ABSTRACT
Introduction Gaborone, the capital of Botswana, is experiencing large-scale urbanisation, much of it taking place in peri-urban areas on tribal land. One such area is Mogoditshane, where different approaches have been tried to manage large-scale urban growth, and which will be used here as an illustration. It is argued that lessons learned over the last decade indicate that, in countries where customary land tenure is a national symbol (as is the case with Botswana), so called ‘modern’ systems of property rights, spatial planning and so on are unlikely to work as anticipated in the periurban context. This is because the customary way of doing business includes the manipulation of land tenure rules, flexibility, uncertainty, ambiguity and coalition formation linked to entrepreneurship. ‘Modern’ land titling systems, by comparison, aim at certainty built around formal rules. (The term ‘modern’ as opposed to ‘customary’ is used here to engage with the debate that is taking place in Africa and does not imply any superiority of ‘modern’ to ‘customary’.)
In areas like Mogoditshane, therefore, land law reform, including schemes to integrate dual legal systems, should not be the main concern. Instead, it is recommended that legal land instruments that can facilitate conflict management should be prioritised for land delivery. This focus is also more likely to deliver sustainable tenure security for the poor, as it addresses a structural tension present in the society, expressed here in social anthropological terms as being between ‘hierarchy formation’ and ‘egalitarian behaviour’ (following Comaroff 1982). Currently, elite groups are being strengthened by the hierarchical tendencies present in the society, but conflict management strategies could bring back some balance by encouraging more egalitarian behaviour. It is suggested that an adapted form of the land readjustment technique is the most useful, and pro-poor, mechanism that could be deployed for this.
