Africa’s rural and urban landscapes are changing rapidly. Many of the reasons for this lie in the changing ways, scale, and pace in which people access and use land — and these in turn are putting pressure on systems of land governance that are struggling to cope. Demographic pressure on productive land, both in rural and urban areas, combined with growing interests for commercial exploitation of natural resources, increase competition over land and its value. Land degradation, pollution and other environmental stresses, including climatic shifts and extreme weather events, put further pressure on productive land. Considering the critical role that...

Across rural Africa, land access is changing as a result of major processes of social and economic transformation. While change is an ever present feature of all land tenure systems, the rapidity of some of the current evolutions is creating challenges for the adaptive capacity of both customary and state-based land governance systems. Increasing population densities, rapid urbanisation, commercial investments and environmental stresses are all increasing pressures on productive land.

This chapter explores some of the most important drivers of change affecting land access in sub-Saharan Africa. Drawing primarily on the literature, the chapter revisits the analysis developed by Cotula...

This chapter sets out the details of the case study sites selected for the field research. As discussed, the research covered two field sites in each focus country, for a total of eight sites. For each site, the chapter outlines key features of local context and broad trends in land access, primarily based on fieldwork findings.

This case study site comprises three rural and peri-urban communities – Apowa, Egyam and Punpune – which are clustered around the Sekondi-Takoradi urban area, and are administratively part of the Ahanta West district in southern Ghana.

Commercial oil operations in the Sekondi-Takoradi area started...

This chapter explores the changes in land access in the eight field sites. While the sites reflect diverse contexts, they also present important similarities – in particular a recurring trend towards increasingly commercialised land relations, accompanied by parallel evolutions in land values, land concentration and fragmentation, land governance systems, land disputes and wider socio-cultural relations. Partly reflecting a site selection criterion, in all sites this trend is at least partly underpinned by external drivers, particularly urban expansion, real estate development and agribusiness or extractive industry operations. But evidence suggests that other drivers of change are at play, including factors linked...

In all eight case study sites, changes in land access and use are affecting rural livelihoods. The changes may create new livelihood opportunities, or improve existing ones, particularly for more commercially oriented players. But they may also undermine access to land for poorer and more vulnerable groups. This chapter explores these dimensions in greater detail, discussing the overall trend and examining specific implications for groups commonly identified as more vulnerable in terms of land access, namely women, youths, and pastoralists.

The eight case studies illustrate the multiple ways in which changes in land access and use are affecting livelihood systems....

Profound transformations in access to land in Africa are occurring that have far-reaching implications. Whilst it is impossible to generalise from the case studies here, our analysis of their similarities and differences, and of the wider literature, allows some wider inferences and context-specific conclusions to be drawn. The picture emerging is one of diverse driving forces increasing competition over land, pushing up land values, and displacing more disadvantaged groups into marginal areas.

In any given field site, there are multiple and often mutually reinforcing sources of pressure on land. In the Ahanta West site, Ghana, for example, oil discovery has...