This collection of research papers from across the African continent illustrates the complex and ever-changing rules of the land tenure game, and how government legislation and reform (formalization) interact with local innovations (informalization) to form land tenure systems.

Securing land rights takes up themes at the centre of socio-political debates throughout the African continent. These relate to national struggles over access to land, land distribution, land rights and security of tenure. Land in much of rural Africa is communally held, a system that provides security of livelihood and a social safety net, but is not immune to appropriation by government or injustices such as the eviction of women from the land on the death of their husbands. This book contextualises Namibia within these debates, highlighting the country's stance in relation to communal land tenure reforms with a focus on the realities of people's lives in north-central Namibia. Leading questions centre on competing ways of ascribing value to land; mechanisms and monetisation of access to land; commercialisation of land use, de-agrarianization and ongoing transformation underpinned by economic and territorial restructuring. These processes have direct impacts on equity in access to land and land distribution, and engender competing visions of land rights. Communal land reform is an uneasy compromise between different processes and interests.

This book provides a significant contribution to the literature on land reform in various African contexts. While the economic evidence is clear that secure property rights are a necessary condition for catalysing broad-based economic development, the governance process by which those rights are secured is less clear. This book details the historical complexity of land rights and the importance of understanding this history in the process of trying to improve tenure security. Through a combination of single country case studies, comparative case studies and regional comparisons, the book is unequivocal that good governance is paramount for improving the performance of land reform programmes. All attempts at moving towards more formal secure tenure require congruence with informal norms, beliefs and values, and a set of clear systems and processes to avoid corruption and unintended negative consequences.

Are women's fragile land rights in Africa being eroded in a period of privatisation and land reforms sponsored by the World Bank? Changing global employment and trade patters and the HIV/AIDS epidemic has affected women in particular. A complexity is that women's and men's interests within households are both joint and separate, yet many land reform programmes are based on the notion of a unitary household in which resources benefit the whole family. Today new land market opportunities also tend to put women at a disadvantage, just as they were under colonialism. Women's secondary rights to land are being extinguished. The detailed, local level research in this volume not only challenges the status quo, but demonstrates that another world is possible and documents the many ways women in Eastern Africa are finding to ensure their rights to land.