Known as the “urbanisation of poverty”, about 62% of people today in towns and cities in sub-Saharan Africa live in informal settlements. This paper finds that land management in these conditions is under extreme pressure, and efforts to secure tenure among the urban poor are dominated by the paradigm of individual title implemented through large-scale titling schemes.
The document reflects on promising practices that have emerged through the work of the TSFSA (Tenure Security Facility Southern Africa) project, which signal new approaches to securing tenure in informal settlements.
Key findings:
- The work of the TSFSA shows that it is possible to work on opening up alternative or additional routes into tenure security. Practices intended to improve tenure security in informal settlements hold the promise of an alternative approach to securing tenure, which is incremental in nature and has the potential for widespread reach. The practices that have been outlined offer officials and community organisations involved in slum or informal settlement upgrading more options than the dominance of the titling paradigm allows.
- Practical mechanisms to improve tenure in the here and now can be identified and applied in slum or informal settlement upgrading programmes and projects. Contextual factors that will shape the prospects of incremental tenure security include legal and policy frameworks, the state’s capacity and willingness to innovate, especially at municipal level, and the strength of civil society organisations that are active in supporting communities under threat.
- It makes pragmatic sense to work with what currently exists – both in law and in local practice – in order to achieve more immediate upgrading and tenure security results. The experiences of the cities of Johannesburg and Cape Town in South Africa show that one way of doing this is by identifying the laws that can be used innovatively to serve adapted ends. Another is to consider confirming the status of local practices and adding municipal or administrative weight to them, as the case study in Huambo, Angola demonstrates.
- The TSFSA found evidence of co-existing official and local systems of land management and governance. Co-existence is evident in different sources of authority, in the different ways land markets operate in poor communities, and in practices that are neither completely official nor completely unofficial. However, for co-existing systems to function effectively they each need to be adapted rather than being integrated, formalised or regularised. Like a puzzle, the pieces need to be manoeuvred and fitted, then refitted, to create a workable system for urban land management in informal settlements.
- Local practitioners – land managers, community authorities, advisors and representatives – should actively negotiate processes of reform to adapt policy and law, and achieve a better fit with the body of local practices in informal settlements. Ordinary residents need to be supported in their efforts to make land management practices more open and inclusive.
- In order to chart alternative routes to tenure security, official practitioners in municipalities and local political representatives need to support innovation and actively engage with and adapt local practice. With official recognition, adapted practice will increase access to the benefits associated with improved tenure security. More work is required to identify and implement strategies for official recognition and to build up a significant body of alternative practice that could form the basis of widespread advocacy. This work should find, develop and apply mechanisms that range from recognising and strengthening community agency to securing tenure through administrative and legal means. While imperfect in many ways, land management practices in informal settlements are the only governance game in town, given limited municipal capacity to provide a great deal more.
Recommendations:
The risk is that, on their own, official interventions may fail to stick, foment conflict, or leave a void where local governance used to work and municipal governance has not yet materialised. This work should:
- start by understanding existing local practices for securing tenure and managing land;
- build from existing local land management practices, especially the local evidence being used;
- adapt and strengthen the local practices, especially the figures of authority and the access they give more vulnerable groups that are likely to include women and children;
- recognise the agency of residents and local structures in managing land;
- promote the roles of NGOs in supporting organisations of the poor to resist evictions and adapt and strengthen local practices in land management;
- promote the roles of NGOs in building alliances with municipalities to find and demonstrate context-specific means for administrative and legal innovation to secure tenure through different forms of official recognition;
- support municipalities to apply existing laws in innovative ways to serve tenure security objectives; and
- advocate more widely for increasing routes to tenure security.