INTRODUCTION: INTERPRETING LAND MARKETS IN AFRICA

Questions about land markets are central to development policy, as underlined recently in the 2008 World Development Report (World Bank 2007: 9). In particular, markets in which land rights are transferred on a temporary or permanent basis are seen as playing a key role in the redistribution of land to more efficient users, thus increasing productivity and employment. In this view, any negative effects attributed to land markets, notably in terms of inequity and landlessness, result from failures in other markets, especially credit and insurance markets (Deininger and Feder 2001; de Janvry et al. 2001; World Bank 2003). In Africa, until late in the twentieth century it was these negative effects, and a perception of land as being relatively abundant due to low population densities in many parts of the continent, that influenced policy makers’ views. Consequently, land markets received relatively little attention in development policy, except, as exemplified in an earlier issue of this journal (Shipton and Goheen 1992), as a means of securing credit flows for agricultural development. Over the past two decades, however, a wave of proposals for land tenure reform in many African countries (Toulmin and Quan 2000; Berry 2002; World Bank 2003) has raised questions about land markets as a means of allocating land that have profound political and economic implications, rarely addressed by previous research. This collection of articles provides an opportunity to explore the nature of land markets in Africa.