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

2. The tenure factor in natural resource management

2.1 The theory of the case

It is now well settled that the sustainable management of resources will depend, to no small extent, on the property regime prevailing in any given area. For it is the property regime which defines tenure, i.e. the manner in which access to resources may be obtained and the conditions under which they may be used; as well as the nature and extent of public interest over those resources in general. That regime is, in turn, culturally determined in the sense that it represents the network of obligations which individual members of a community owe to each other, and the quality and quantity of rights they may individually or collectively appropriate in virtue of those resources.

It is from this perspective that the Kenya government has in the last forty-five years sought to reorganize the proprietary basis of land holding and use in the rural areas. That exercise has been concerned mainly with the conversion of indigenous land tenure arrangements into a regime based on western (and especially English) notions of private property. The theory of the case, as the architects of that exercise explain it, is that indigenous property regimes, and especially tenure relations, are ex hypothesi, incapable of generating the discipline, industry, efficiency, and security necessary for the sustainable management of land and land-based resources. The corollary to that argument is that private property regimes are a necessary pre-condition to such management.

Before an analysis of that argument and its operational incidents are undertaken it might be useful to explain its origins and how it became a cardinal principle in Kenya's natural resource management policy.

 

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