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Property rights and wrongs: Land reforms for sustainable food production in rural Mali

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Title Property rights and wrongs: Land reforms for sustainable food production in rural Mali
 
Creator Totin, Edmond
Segnon, Alcade C
Roncoli, Carla
Thompson-Hall, Mary
Sidibé, Amadou
Carr, Edward R.
 
Subject land reform
land tenure
food security
agriculture
climate change
 
Description Agricultural land reforms are crucial to promote investments in sustainable land management and food production amidst accelerating urbanization and increasing population growth. However, notable gaps remain in the literature regarding how land reforms designed at the national level are implemented in localized contexts, especially as they interplay with customary tenure regimes. Adopting an institutional bricolage perspective, we explore interactions between local tenure arrangements and government land reforms and the resulting implications for food production in rural Mali. We show that specific market-based land tenure arrangements in the study area emerged from a combination of urbanization pressures and government-designed land reform. We find that tenure security is linked to agricultural investment decisions, as also documented by previous studies. We likewise show that anxieties and ambiguities stemming from state-mandated land registration foster the emergence of monetized forms of access to collective land. These new market-based systems drive greater out- migration of productive community members, leading to labour shortages and weakening the social cohesion and mutual support systems upon which the most vulnerable depend. The findings show that top-down land reforms in rural Mali lead to disruptions of the social fabric, along with re-organizations of tenure systems to accommodate social norms and priorities. We illustrate how, in the context of centralized policy making with limited local consultation, community members resist cooperating and creatively search for alternatives to achieve their social goals. Empirical investigations of socio-institutional challenges such as land tenure arrangements are critical for effective scaling of agricultural innovations and sustainable food production.
 
Date 2021-10-01
2021-06-21T13:50:07Z
2021-06-21T13:50:07Z
 
Type Journal Article
 
Identifier Totin E, Segnon AC, Roncoli C, Thompson-Hall M, Sidibé A, Carr ER. 2021. Property rights and wrongs: Land reforms for sustainable food production in rural Mali. Land Use Policy 109:105610.
0264-8377
https://hdl.handle.net/10568/114040
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.landusepol.2021.105610
 
Language en
 
Rights CC-BY-NC-ND
Open Access
 
Format 105610
 
Publisher Elsevier
 
Source Land Use Policy