Guiding Principles:
Land Tenure in Development Cooperation

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Orientierungsrahmen:
Bodenrecht und Bodenordnung

 
Deutsche Gesellschaft
für Technische Zusammenarbeit
Abt. 45 / Div. 45

 

H.W.O. Okoth-Ogendo:
Land Tenure And Natural Resource Management: The Kenya Experience

1. Introduction

1.1 A statement of the problem

Sustainability has emerged as the organizing idiom of development in the final decade of the 20th Century. For Africa, this means that apart from the need to enhance the quality of her vast human capital, the rate at which land and land based resources are consumed must not outstrip the capacity for their regeneration, conservation and further development. To maintain that equilibrium, principles, norms, processes and institutions which guarantee easy and equitable access to those resources must be in place; as should efficient technologies of productive utilization and responsible governance at all levels of public decision-making. In other words, the sustainable management of land and land based resources in Africa requires, inter alia, a regime of property, and use structures which are integral to social organization, sensitive to resource availability and scarcity, and responsive to changes in technologies of production. It is for this reason that issues of land tenure have attracted so much discourse in natural resource development in Africa.

This presentation examines the way in which Kenya has sought to maintain that equilibrium through changes in the proprietary context in which land and land based resources are obtained and used, and the implications which this has had for culture, economy and society. It argues that radical as those changes may have been, Kenya has not been able, even after nearly fifty years, to arrive at a suitable property regime for the sustainable management of natural resources.

 

The terms employed in this document and the presentation of data contained therein do not imply, on the part of the Sahara and Sahel Observatory (OSS), any opinion concerning the legal status of countries, territories, cities and zones, or their authorities, or the demarcation of their borders or confines. The opinions and recommendations presented in this report which are the result of a workshop do not necessarily represent the position of the OSS.

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