ABSTRACT
Hybridity features in everyday practices that shape the urban landscape of African cities. In Ghana, the process of urban land delivery and the complexities of funding land use planning are addressed through formal and informal practices of institutional bricolage. This chapter uses the concept of hybrid governance as an analytical lens to examine the interplay between customary and statutory practices in urban land development. Empirically, the arguments are based on analyses of qualitative interviews with traditional landholding chiefs, town planners and land professionals in Tamale, Ghana. The chapter elucidates how traditional chiefs serve as critical interfaces to enhance the legitimacy and functionality of statutory planning and land administration processes and, by so doing, produce a hybrid land administration system that is neither completely formal nor informal but complementary and adapted to the prevailing legal land system. Considering the daily realities of negotiations where the activities of formal and informal actors are intertwined, we conclude that hybrid governance practices are inescapable in urban land development in many African cities. Thus, southern urban planning scholarship must focus on uncovering constructive and adaptive hybrid practices with the potential to address the challenges of planning and urban land administration in African cities.
