Tenure regimes and land use systems in Africa: The challenges of sustainability

This paper re-evaluates the characteristics of African land tenure regimes with a view to assessing their impact on land use decision-making in general, and the sustainable management of land resources in particular. This is done by examining what sustainable management of land resources requires, the structural and normative characteristics, the contextual framework that made African tenure regimes particularly amenable to that principle, the pressures that have all but destroyed these regimes over time, and what options are available to governments in the reform of such regimes.