● Recognising and resolving contradictory public actions

The final factor to consider in land conversion dynamics is possible contradictions between different levels of public action. On the one hand, national emergence policies stimulate urban sprawl through major projects, financialisation, and different kinds of support for housing production and the property sector. Economic actors' initiatives and expectations are taking precedence over the State's desire for supervision and planning, and the huge financial interests at play are accelerating territorial change in increasingly remote areas far from urban centres where land is less expensive. At the other end of the scale, lower-income actors who acquire microplots for housing, as a form of insurance against health risks, or to enable them to access resources and build up capital for an economic project or secure their children's future are also participating in the financialisation of land that has been taken out of agricultural use.

Conversely, pressure from voters and civil society to heed public debate on the artificialisation and monopolisation of land in peri-urban areas is strengthening the political will to find strategies to regulate, limit and guide urban expansion. Concerns about working-class access to housing and the need to support or even redevelop peri-urban and urban agriculture in order to shorten food supply chains are creating some pushback against liberal approaches that favour market-based development of peri-urban land in order to increase local income streams. Policies that promote market dispersion and artificialisation are under increasing pressure from environmental issues. As the need to model sustainable cities grows ever more acute, it is also important to acknowledge that environmental efforts to enhance local landscapes may also contribute to land scarcity and thus social exclusion as land prices rise. Land conversions must be considered in the context of increasing and increasingly contested metropolitan fragility.

This raises several dilemmas, as better support, structuring and rationalisation can increase costs in ways that conflict with efforts to improve social inclusion. More effective regulation requires institutional willingness and capacity in contexts where State and local government officials are often involved in land speculation. Many local administrations are already weak, and they are further limited when political actors use them to protect or even enhance their own land interests and electoral prospects. **The common interest is undermined by local elected officials and public actors who use the land registry, urban planning procedures, the agricultural sector or the justice system to enlarge their personal land portfolios and boost their incomes and assets.** Even where corruption is not involved, it is important to understand that many land conversions flow from negotiated norms or legal practices that serve not only political interests and local elites, but also enable ordinary people to access land and housing.

Government mechanisms are also used by diverse (and sometimes unexpected) actors with unequal economic resources and needs. This can disrupt other types of regulation and expose contradictions between different modes of public action. For example, instruments to facilitate the construction of affordable apartment blocks in the outer suburbs often include no measures to ensure that local developers consider their environmental impacts (soil pollution, heavy groundwater pumping, sand extraction), which then have to be dealt with by the local authorities.

There are also questions about the role that compartmented sectoral interventions by international institutions play in land conversions. Despite their increasing focus on these issues, their preference for particular urban, rural or sectoral approaches can lead to inconsistent strategies, as seen in two recently commissioned WAEMU studies on urban and rural land markets (see Box 15).
Box 16

CONTRADICTORY RECOMMENDATIONS FROM STUDIES ON URBAN AND
RURAL LAND MARKETS COMMISSIONED BY THE WEST AFRICAN ECONOMIC
AND MONETARY UNION (WAEMU)

WAEMU published two studies on urban and rural land markets in 2017.

Proposals in the **WAEMU study on urban land markets** (African Agency for Urban Planning and Development, 2017) aim to "promote and develop the urban land market in the WAEMU region" by consolidating the legal, fiscal and institutional environment (SO1), the economic and financial environment (SO2), urban planning and management tools (SO3), and actions to strengthen governance (SO4).

The study recommends a legal and institutional approach to regulating transactions: identify measures to regulate the market (Project 5) and generalise delivery of final property titles (Project 13), with precedence given to identifying business opportunities rather than regulating existing land transactions. Project 5 (control over land markets) aims to identify the actors in each country's urban land market, establish their activities and roles, and "measure the business niches in each centre of activity in order to control their exploitation and reduce negative externalities in the urban environment and surrounding rural land reserves."

The recommended approach to peri-urban areas, which are characterised as having "a dynamic relationship", is based on "exchange relations between rural and urban economies", with

> Harmonised planning through the establishment of urban areas (Project 9);

> The introduction of green belts (Project 11);

> Awareness raising and information about planning documents and land acquisition procedures (Project 12).

The main thrust of the recommendations is to harmonise legal and institutional arrangements at the WAEMU level (standardise planning, similar set-ups for professional bodies, etc.) and generalise land titles (land registration and conservation, Project 13) to support a mortgage housing market that is accessible to people on low incomes. Even though this seems unrealistic, the model of constructing and financing housing by developing mortgage credit seems to have been accepted without reservation.

**WAEMU study on rural land markets** (Lavigne Delville et al., 2017a and 2017b; Merlet et al., 2017). This study takes a socio-anthropological and pluralist approach. Its main recommendation for regulating transactions centre around four aspects of rural land markets:

> Securing transactions;

> Differentiated rules according to the spaces and actors concerned;

> Rebalancing actors' relationships to make land markets more equitable and economically efficient;

> Discouraging unproductive and speculative purchases.

.../...
In operational terms, the study recommends regulatory mechanisms that are "pragmatic, simple, rooted in reality and consistent with institutional capacities". The priority in regulating land markets is to ensure that contracts for both legal and non-legalised plots are secure. They can be secured with minutes of family council meetings or by formalising long-term leases in writing. In terms of land management, the local, communal and inter-communal rules that define spaces, uses and possible changes need to be clarified in a way that is consistent with development policies at different scales. Measures to rebalance the market, such as encouraging rentals, could make the economic environment more secure for producers. The final suggestion is to introduce an annual tax on unproductive land in order to discourage speculative land acquisitions.

## Recommendations

The diverse dynamics at play make territorial planning and management at different scales extremely challenging. It is important to establish a strict framework for changes in land rights and land uses that recognises the complex strategies involved and facilitates sustainable territorial development while leaving working-class actors sufficient room to manoeuvre and access the land they need for housing, to fund their life projects or secure their children's future. Some suggested guidelines for action based on our findings are presented below.

* Strengthen dialogue between research and public action on land management in rural/urban interfaces

Measures to limit land conversions will not work if they take no account of stakeholders' needs. Regulatory and zoning measures are ineffective in tackling situations where people act out of necessity, distress, or the basic need to survive (deteriorating agricultural conditions, housing shortages): it is important to **understand the upstream logics and economic expectations that drive land transactions**, and their potential outcomes. This requires:

>> Better understanding of land's value as a form of insurance, the survival/heritage mechanisms that stimulate popular land markets, and how they relate to policies on financial inclusion (access to credit) and proposed universal insurance policies (health, education, etc.);

>> Support for popular alternatives to insurance-based land capitalisation.

**These socio-economic issues should be considered in terms of multi-actor governance rather than vertical and sectoral governance.** Thinking around governance should regard resident communities as the main land actors in the locality, consider how their means and needs affect their capacities, and take account of what is happening outside the political and administrative boundaries of urban areas.

Participatory processes should be prioritised, and legal mechanisms that authorise enforceable citizen territorial planning are to be encouraged. As there are still very few studies on the empowerment of local governments in rural/urban interfaces where land is increasingly commodified, it would be useful to analyse how local authorities use their new
institutional mandates and decentralisation funds to prevent certain transactions or leverage urban investment.

Environmental and climatic changes in these urbanisation fronts should also be studied, with more interdisciplinary approaches, participatory science and better dissemination of survey data to the authorities and civil society. Environmental scientists have started investigating this issue by analysing pollution and pressures on agricultural soils and groundwater in peri-urban contexts (Tankari Dan-Badjo et al., 2013; Sorensen et al., 2015), but have so far focused on water stress and irrigation initiatives that concern producers (Simon et al., 2004). Clear links are sometimes made between the increasing commodification of land and privatised access to water (Bartels et al., 2018), but there is little focus on how the ecological context influences land transactions and resistance or adaptation to urban demands (Bertrand and Bon, 2022). Upstream data are needed on groundwater volumes and properties, and the agronomic and ecological conditions of artificialised land (Chéry et al., 2009). It would also be useful to revisit the concept of artificialisation in light of the prolonged fallow periods, extraction activities and temporary cultivation associated with peripheral urbanisation. Some authors argue that we should move away from an exclusionary definition of artificialisation (non-natural and non-forest land), and instead consider a gradient of soil disturbances – abandoned land uses, sealing, contamination, presence of vegetation. This would involve a shift from statistical categories of artificialised soils based solely on soil cover or the extension of built-up areas (for a summary, see Desrousseaux et al., 2019). Pollution in remote areas that are undergoing urbanisation also needs to be examined, as well as the possible health risks from dust raised by the increasing number of vehicles using unpaved roads, potential new zoonoses, and brownfield sites that are major breeding grounds for mosquitoes carrying diseases such as dengue and chikungunya.

In order to measure changes in land use and future urbanisation, we need to be able to count the number of plots that are left fallow (subdivided or otherwise). In the vast majority of cases, fallow land is not returned to productive use. Plots often go unwatered and may even have their topsoil sold, but are still counted as agricultural land while they are not built upon, even if it is years since they were last cultivated. The extent to which land uses have changed remains largely invisible as it is not captured by the statistics; and the measurements that are taken are usually gathered by rural and/or agricultural administrations, which look at them in terms of agricultural production and very rarely share them with urban administrations or land registries. This raises the issue of intersectoral information production and sharing between rural, agricultural, urban, environmental and water resource administrations. Land that is categorised as 'wasteland' should become a shared marker for detecting and anticipating change on urban fronts, or indeed any land. Participatory approaches could be developed to encourage local people to report wastelands (sharing geolocated photographs, etc.) so that the health risks associated with stagnant water, or fire or flood risks can be managed.

> Attempts have been made to tax undeveloped land (see Box 18, or the Kenyan case study in this report), but it is very hard to tax wasteland that is not recognised as building land. It would have to be taxed because of the lack of cultivation, which would not be popular.

> This raises the question of how the observation of noticeable changes in land use can link into changes in regulatory tools (new territories to be taken into account, new regulations, etc.).
Box 17

MECHANISMS AND TOOLS FOR LOCAL AUTHORITIES

Knowledge of the situation and dynamics at play, relevant expertise, and territorial coordination are vital factors in defining and steering policies to address planning, structural and regulatory issues. Increasingly powerful technical tools are becoming available (such as satellite imagery with raw or processed data, see Box 1: Redefinitions and new sources of urban data), along with participatory territorial engineering techniques for prospective urban planning and thinking that involve all the different actors who make up cities. If local authorities are to use these tools effectively, they need to prioritise their urban policy objectives, organise themselves accordingly, and have the human resources and expertise needed to pursue these objectives. These are all organisational and financial challenges.

One way of tackling these challenges is to set up urban planning agencies, which are mandated to deal with these territorial and land development issues, bring together diverse resources and technical expertise, and are designed to serve their members, whose nature and number vary according to the country and agglomeration concerned. There are various models of urban agency around the world: from the Institute of Urban Research and Planning in Curitiba, Brazil (IPUCC, https://ippuc.org.br/) to agencies in Morocco whose tasks include conducting studies for urban development master plans, monitoring their implementation, and providing technical assistance to local authorities and public establishments responsible for urban planning. A number of these urban agencies are listed in the Metropolitan and Territorial Planning Agencies (MTPA) network.

The French Development Agency (AFD) has contributed to the emergence of these tools, working in partnership with the Fédération Nationale des Agences d'Urbanisme (FNAU) and its members at the international level. It has published a guide to creating an urban planning agency (https://www.fnau.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/guide-afd-fnau-a4-v19-1.pdf) and supported specific initiatives such as the Greater Antananarivo urban planning agency (IPAM) in Madagascar, which opened in 2020. IPAM's mission is to disseminate knowledge, advice and urban expertise to help develop the agglomeration that includes the urban commune of Antananarivo and 37 peripheral communes. It is structured around two objectives: to act as a shared resource centre for knowledge of the Greater Antananarivo area, and to play a key role in construction of the city by providing advice and expertise. It is expected to contribute to better managed urban development through knowledge, technical expertise, advice and territorial coordination.

Some agencies have set up specific land observatories. The Urban Planning and Development Agency for French Guiana in the French Overseas Territories set up an observatory to improve monitoring of the territories' land and property markets (whose opacity and complexity were distorting prices), learn more about their land reserves and potential for urban projects, and make the data public via an open portal (https://www.geoguyane.fr). Other bodies and mechanisms to help clarify various aspects of urban dynamics include regional organisations such as the Centre for Affordable Housing Finance in Africa (CAHF). Rather than a single model, there is a series of tools and mechanisms that can be adapted to the needs of local authorities in the South and help them meet the challenges of managing their territory and preserving their agricultural land.

Alix Françoise, French Development Agency
● Engage with conflicting interests: negotiation is preferable to power struggles and conflicts, even if it is asymmetrical

Participatory mechanisms are needed to rebalance the power relations between actors whose divergent interests and capacities for action leave some parties in an extremely vulnerable position. These mechanisms could include:

> Holding genuine public enquiries ahead of large-scale private projects and initiatives that wish to be included in public utility recognition procedures;

> Reviewing the fines and penalties payable by members of the administration or local elected officials who are found guilty of corruption, issuing illegal certificates or taking decisions that conflict with legal provisions and thereby causing local people to lose their legitimate land rights;

> Organising consultations in territories with high rates of land conversion, with multi-stakeholder territorial planning mechanisms, where they exist.<fnref n="13" />

The potential revenues generated by land conversions can result in the public authorities having conflicting interests in these processes, making them both part of the problem and part of the solution.

Another consideration is the levels at which regulations should be set. As land conversions usually extend beyond communal boundaries, inter-communal bodies (where they exist) can be agents of reflection and action. Including other institutions (families, the State, user groups, etc.) in discussions about food security, environmental justice and other issues can help communities build a collective vision of what they are losing and what they are gaining through land conversion and urbanisation processes.

This recommendation draws on the lessons learned from decades of participatory processes, especially those relating to large-scale rural land grabs. One key lesson learned is the importance of the conditions in which these processes are implemented, and the need to:

> Ensure that participation is transparent and open to economic actors and investors who are often regarded as disruptive;

> Encourage the use of objective mechanisms to enable affected actors to express their opinions, and give realistic presentations of the projects' negative effects as well as their positive impacts (Durand, 2019; Leblond, 2019);

> Remember that civil servants, representatives of public administrations (taxes, land registry, agriculture, etc.) and local elected officials are often landowners or investors themselves, and may therefore have a personal interest in urban development. More independent and frequent local consultation procedures are needed to improve on the current system, which gives elected local politicians powers to plan and modify land uses (legislative frameworks and urban planning codes cannot always guarantee that the common interest will be served).

<footnote n="13">13. Such as the major consultation process for the Niayes 2040 project.</footnote>
● Developing legal regulations that support social and environmental justice

The speed at which land conversions are occurring is partly due to the legal uncertainties surrounding the process. Changes to certain legal statutes could improve the way that responsibilities are shared, particularly environmental responsibilities:

>> Strengthen co-ownership by new residents in developed areas by giving them joint responsibilities for environmental issues and including them in reflections on the legal framework for soil and subsoil ownership. There could be more specific checks on groundwater exploitation (hydrogeological studies and sanitation inspections), natural resource extraction, overexploitation of groundwater for agricultural activities and irrigation, and the construction of wells and boreholes; along with legislation setting out provisions for groundwater protection or recharge.

>> Civil society could support citizen land trusts as an alternative way for residents to take practical action on land issues, protect land and support local agriculture (see Terres de liens in France, cooperative statutes in various countries, Community Land Trust). These citizen land trusts could link up with actions to preserve existing rural commons and secure pastoral commons by including transhumants.

Existing land and exploitation rights should be respected and secured:

>> Avoid forced sales and dispossession, even of 'informal' rights;

>> When land is expropriated, ensure that proper compensation is paid and solid mechanisms for reparation and managing complaints are in place. Land should only be expropriated if it is in the public interest, or if the landholder does not agree with a locally approved collective project (plots in the middle of the project site). Compensation should take account of the farmers' loss of livelihood and enable them to rebuild sustainable livelihoods;

>> Enable rural farmers to postpone projected sales by helping improve farm incomes, facilitating access to credit and agricultural insurance, and supporting collective initiatives that enable farmers to continue their agricultural activities (agricultural land groups, etc.);

>> Formalise and secure purchases of unregistered land;

>> Help secure and facilitate access to land for the most vulnerable members of society through social agreements that make land available to women's and youth groups, land reserves for future generations, etc.

● Use planning and forecasting instruments to harmonise different sectoral approaches and timeframes

Compartmentalised public actions can lead to contradictory efforts and unanticipated territorial effects in the short or medium term. Various steps could be taken to counteract these perverse effects:

>> Link infrastructure planning (particularly for roads) with land management policies to improve the management of emerging zones and areas where speculative land purchases are increasing;
>> Understand and anticipate the spatial dynamics that sectoral policies generate, especially economic emergence policies regarding SEZs, new towns, affordable housing and tourism development;

>> Develop and encourage the implementation of clear, simple standards that provide, if possible, a minimum framework for development and parcelling processes,<fnref n="14" /> such as minimum criteria for the following aspects of communal development plans: wetlands, water circulation, minimum town planning standards (roads, public spaces, connections to essential services), maintaining agricultural spaces, and environmental standards.

● Support local management capacities

All of our case studies highlight the importance of local management, particularly for decentralised and devolved services previously undertaken by central authorities such as national environmental agencies. But local management bodies often lack the necessary capacity for action and are poorly coordinated with other institutional levels. A better balance between responsibilities and capacities at different institutional levels is needed. This could be achieved by:

>> Continuing to strengthen local authorities' financial, technical and human capacities, particularly in processing and archiving land and environmental data;

>> Where necessary, setting up specific land management training courses to help local authorities and land administrations recruit qualified staff;

>> Promoting cross-sectoral coordination tools and platforms;

>> Putting in place public information systems (public displays at town halls and deconcentrated service offices) for more transparent governance of development and subdivision operations;

>> Setting conditions for the negotiation and approval of private developments;

>> Developing recurrent and conditional financing arrangements for parcelling groundworks so that they don't become money-spinners for public and private actors (such as conditional investment funds held by ministries or communities).

Box 18

LOCAL FINANCE IN RAPIDLY URBANISING REGIONS

The international aid and economic research community has long debated local finance in the global South. This debate was particularly lively when decentralisation reforms were at their height in the 1980s and 1990s, and came back into focus in the late 2000s, fed by reports and initiatives by local actors, organisations such as the Lincoln Institute for Land Policy (LILP) and the International Centre for Tax and Development (ICTD), and the joint OECD-UCLG initiative to set up a World Observatory on Subnational

.../...

<footnote n="14">14. This recommendation picks up on some of Tribillon's work on African cities, particularly Tribillon (1993).</footnote>
Government Finance and Investment (SNG-WOFI) in 2017.<fnref n="15" /> The Global Land Tool Network is also a centre for resources on local finance.

Analysis of major trends in local government **revenues** in the global South show that overall revenues are low, and mainly based on State transfers (which account for 58% of local government revenues in Africa). This reduces local governments' autonomy and their capacity to fulfil their mandate to deliver urban services and amenities. Levels of **investment and expenditure** are also low: local governments in Africa account for just 19% of public investment, compared with 36% and 41% globally (OECD/UCLG, 2019).

There has been a particular focus on sources of local revenue that enable local governments to become financially autonomous and to **finance urbanisation** – to provide the services and facilities they are responsible for in both existing cities and surrounding areas undergoing rapid urbanisation (Paulais, 2012; OECD et al., 2022; Bahl et al., 2013; Goodfellow, 2015). Land-based taxation also returned to prominence in recent years against a backdrop of urban development and sustained urban growth, with key publications by authors such as Berrisford et al., 2018, Cirolia and Mizes, 2019, and Walters et al., 2016.

Property taxation mechanisms are a feature of their work, following the economic theory that land and property are immobile assets and therefore suitable targets for local taxes. These taxes are usually raised on built-up land, although unbuilt land and sales of building rights are sometimes taxed too, as are leases on public land (land leasing) in countries with British-style land laws. Money can also be raised through land readjustment, where land patterns are restructured and some land may be transferred into the public domain for infrastructures. This facilitates major development operations that can be partly funded with money from landowners.<fnref n="16" />

**Land value capture or ground rent** also feature prominently in this line of thought. Land value capture is a set of tools that enables public authorities to take advantage of rising urban land values, particularly when building new infrastructures. This can be done by making landowners or developers whose land increases in value pay capital gains tax (*betterment levies*), or getting developers to make financial or in-kind contributions (*developers exactions*). These tools are mainly used in emerging economies where land prices are soaring (Brazil, India, Colombia). They require significant public capacity for implementation, and are less widely used on the African continent, where land tenure systems are complex and land information is lacking.

**Academics have paid less attention to vacant or fallow land, which is rarely taxed** (Franzsen and McCluskey, 2017). This type of land is often exempt from taxation, either because it is located outside urban areas (in contexts where only urban areas or built-up land are taxed) or because it is technically difficult and socially unacceptable to tax (because it is hard to identify the owner, or because it is customary rural land, not connected to urban services, or is in a rural area where incomes are very low).

<footnote n="15">15. With support from the Asian Development Bank, AFD, the Council of Europe Development Bank, the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the United Nations Capital Development Fund, and the Development Partners Network on Decentralisation and Local Governance (DeLoG).</footnote>

<footnote n="16">16. Land consolidation in peri-urban areas of Benin is an example of this. Berrisford et al. (2018) refer to Global Land Tool Network country reports and exchange visits to discuss the potential of land consolidation in Africa, citing publications such as Fourie, C. (2004), Land Readjustment for Peri-Urban Customary Tenure: The Example of Botswana, Earthscan press, London, and Adam, A. G. (2015), Land readjustment as an alternative land development tool for peri-urban areas of Ethiopia, *Property Management*, No. 33(1), pp. 36-58.</footnote>
**Rural land taxes** generally depend on the legal status of the land. Taxes often only apply to registered or titled land, and countries such as Kenya, Botswana, Lesotho, Uganda and Zimbabwe only charge property taxes in urban or developed areas. In some countries (such as Mozambique and Tanzania), all land is owned by the State and is not taxable. It can be leased, but rent collection is generally low.

Tools for taxing **vacant urban land** are more commonly available. Franzsen and McCluskey (2017) note that vacant or undeveloped land in urban areas of Africa is taxed in countries with Anglo-Saxon systems, such as Botswana, Kenya, Namibia, South Africa, Swaziland and Zimbabwe. Francophone countries such as Benin, Burundi, Central African Republic, Chad, Congo, Côte d'Ivoire, Gabon, Madagascar and Togo have a specific tax for this type of land, although it is rarely enforced. A few countries, such as Botswana, Liberia, Namibia and South Africa offer tax incentives to develop urban land in order to reduce land vacancy in densely populated areas. For example, vacant plots in Pretoria, South Africa, are taxed at over six times the rate of residential land. In Namibia, tax penalties apply to unused land in planned urban development areas, with rates doubling if the land remains vacant for two years, and quadrupling after five years.

Latin America has some fairly longstanding examples of this kind of tax (Haas and Kopanyi, 2017; de Araujo Larangeira, 2003). Porto Alegre in Brazil introduced a vacant land tax in 1988, along with the new state constitution, and applied it relatively effectively to the small number of owners (65) holding vacant land in the city. In Colombia, Bogotá charges tax on vacant land at a rate that triples over a ten-year period if the land is not developed. The city can also reclaim land that is left undeveloped for more than two years and put it up for public auction. The city of Mexcali in northern Mexico introduced a staggered tax that increases by 25% each year the land is left vacant. This was considered particularly successful as it not only generated a twelve-fold increase in municipal revenues, but also prompted many owners to register their properties in order to avoid paying the tax. The tax was not staggered in Mexico City and other urban areas across the country. Metropolitan areas in the Philippines have the option of applying a 5% surcharge on vacant land, which is now enforced in most cities, and Quezon City in Metro Manila charges 3% tax on vacant land near national highways (McCluskey and Franzsen, 2013).

The studies also examine the **performance of existing tax systems**, looking at tax management and administration, governance, and the political issues associated with land taxes. Updating land information in fast-growing regions is a huge challenge, especially in sub-Saharan Africa, whose specific characteristics, complex land tenure systems and legal pluralism make it hard to maintain land databases (Franzsen and MacCluskey, 2017). The social contract between citizens and local public authorities is sometimes tenuous, especially when these authorities are newly installed; and the volume of international aid in some countries can also dampen the political will to implement local taxes.

Finally, there has been no focused reflection or concrete experience with brownfields on the outer edges of urban areas. A first step would be to conduct dedicated empirical research to document them and determine why taxing them seems to be such a challenge.
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* YUNG, J.-M., & BOSC, P.-M., (1999). Schumpeter au Sahel. In *CHAUVEAU, J.-P., CORMIER SALEM, M.-C., & MOLLARD, E. (Eds.), *L'innovation en agriculture*. Éditions de l'IRD, Paris, pp. 143-168.
LIST OF BOXES

<table><tr><td>Box 1.</td><td>Redefinitions of urban areas, and new sources of urban data</td><td>16</td></tr><tr><td>Box 2.</td><td>Africapolis Report on changes in land use (OECD, 2020)</td><td>20</td></tr><tr><td>Box 3.</td><td>Processed satellite images of micro-lot divisions between 2010 and 2020 for case studies in Kenya, India and Côte d'Ivoire</td><td>22</td></tr><tr><td>Box 4.</td><td>Examples from India of counting fallow land other than current fallow</td><td>23</td></tr><tr><td>Box 5.</td><td>Land reforms and sales pastoral land in Jordan</td><td>28</td></tr><tr><td>Box 6.</td><td>Emergent and resilient urban and peri-urban agriculture in Togo, Vietnam, Burkina Faso, Madagascar</td><td>32</td></tr><tr><td>Box 7.</td><td>Forms of urbanisation and agricultural land in Africa identified by the Africapolis 2020 report</td><td>33</td></tr><tr><td>Box 8.</td><td>Consent, resistance and a sense of injustice - a review of the academic literature</td><td>34</td></tr><tr><td>Box 9.</td><td>New housing production tools are driving changes in land use</td><td>37</td></tr><tr><td>Box 10.</td><td>Contested State takeover of land in Diamniadio, Senegal</td><td>39</td></tr><tr><td>Box 11.</td><td>Land allocations by town halls in Senegal</td><td>44</td></tr><tr><td>Box 12.</td><td>Changing patterns of land conversion and the arrival of transnational capital in Sihanoukville, Cambodia</td><td>45</td></tr><tr><td>Box 13.</td><td>Migration, diasporas and land transaction dynamics in an increasingly mobile Africa</td><td>50</td></tr><tr><td>Box 14.</td><td>An economy built around micro-lots</td><td>59</td></tr><tr><td>Box 15.</td><td>Farmers turning to property development in the Delhi region of India</td><td>60</td></tr><tr><td>Box 16.</td><td>Contradictory recommendations from studies on urban and rural land markets commissioned by the West African Economic and Monetary Union (WAEMU)</td><td>77</td></tr><tr><td>Box 17.</td><td>Mechanisms and tools for local authorities</td><td>80</td></tr><tr><td>Box 18.</td><td>Local finance in rapidly urbanising regions</td><td>83</td></tr></table>
LIST OF FIGURES

<table><tr><td>Figure 1.</td><td>Distribution of urban built-up areas in km² in 1990, 2015 and 2020</td><td>18</td></tr><tr><td>Figure 2.</td><td>Diversity of rural lands and landholders</td><td>27</td></tr><tr><td>Figure 3.</td><td>Life cycle of a parcel: changes in its monetary value, use and surface area</td><td>67</td></tr><tr><td>Figure 4.</td><td>Pathways to land conversion</td><td>68</td></tr><tr><td>Figure 5.</td><td>Major factors in agricultural land conversion</td><td>68</td></tr><tr><td>Figure 6.</td><td>Typology of land conversion processes according to levels of access to capital and changes of use</td><td>69</td></tr></table>
LIST OF PHOTOS

* Owner of agricultural land near the new city of Diamniadio, Dakar, Senegal, 2019 34

* Construction on former agricultural land on the outskirts of Delhi, India, 2020 37

* Examples of housing developments on the outskirts of Mexico City, 2019 38

* Land acquired by a local developer in Tami Nadu, India, 2017 47

* Subdivided farmland, acquisitions by low-income households and fallow land in Hlegu, Burma, 2019 48

* Fenced subdivided plot on the edge of the lagoon in Togbin, Benin, 2021 49

* Land 70 km from Nairobi purchased in 2018 by a cooperative set up by members of the Kenyan diaspora who live in England and Ireland, 2022 50

* Building works on land purchased by a civil servants' cooperative in Amman, Jordan, 2021 53

* Land in Kenya bought and subdivided by a civil servants' cooperative. To date, only one member has started building a house, 2021 54

* Examples of markers and fences in Kenya: bits of wood, posts, barbed wire, walls, line of trees and gate, 2022 56

* Wall round an uncultivated plot on a subdivided landholding in Togbin, Benin, 2021 57

* Construction on newly parcelled land in Djimini-Koffikro, Côte d'Ivoire, 2023 58

* Walls around two unused plots of subdivided land in Konza, Kenya, owned by entrepreneurs from Nairobi, 2021 58

* Housing under construction in Mapinga, a suburb of greater Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, 2019 60

* Buildings constructed by the three Gupta brothers in Faridabad, India, next to their original village home in the centre of the photograph, 2020 61

* Wells and boundary markers on vacant plots in Kitengela, Kenya, owned by a cooperative, 2021 62

* Plots markers in Bagamoyo, on the outskirts of greater Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, 2018 63

* Micro-lots in Bahour, India, 2018 64
<figure><img src="image_35.png" /></figure>

# Ordinary changes in land use linked to urbanisation in the global Souths

## Housing, capitalisation, agricultural changes

This study considers the ways in which land use is changing in the global South, and how these changes are linked to urbanisation. The different stages of the conversion process are analysed: changes in ownership, acquisition of land rights, land transactions, plot divisions, productive use through construction and property development (housing estates, building projects of various sizes, etc.), and fallow land (demarcated parcels that remain undeveloped). Large-scale land conversions generated by major development and infrastructure projects, industrial and extractive activities, and large-scale land grabs in rural areas have been widely examined over the past decade. But little has been written about how ordinary actors – residents, land rights holders, entrepreneurs and local elected officials – acquire plots of land and change the way they are used in order to build houses, develop economic activities or accumulate capital. Given that these activities are occurring on a huge scale, it is important to determine what drives them and how local administrators and political players navigate the systems that are supposed to regulate land conversions.

The pace of these conversions is accelerating due to a range of factors: urban growth at different levels, changes in local legal arrangements for accessing rural land, the

rise of rural and urban land markets, and the increasing power of private and financial actors in land and property production and urban development. They are also generating far-reaching effects – causing environmental degradation, increasing socio-economic inequalities, pressure on family farms and sterilisation of fertile soils, exacerbating financial risks at many levels, and adding to the burden borne by the authorities responsible for delivering infrastructure and services.

Land conversions need to be regulated. But the tools traditionally used for planning, zoning and protecting agricultural areas need to be adapted and expanded to facilitate coordinated action on diverse public policies and across urban and rural sectors. The “Land Tenure and Development”Technical Committee draws on the study findings to suggest a number of avenues and principles to guide public action, support local actors and develop standards that recognise and frame their practices. Inclusive financial mechanisms are also essential for land to regain its primary function as a usable resource, along with tax systems that enable the revenues generated by land conversions to help fund local development, and support for participatory territorial planning approaches that take account of environmental issues and the need to maintain agricultural production. ●

**The "Land Tenure and Development" Technical Committee** is a working group composed of experts, researchers and land policy actors. Since its creation in 1996 it has worked with numerous French and international actors to support the French Cooperation's strategic thinking and analysis of action on land issues.

In addition to the White Paper by French Cooperation actors, other publications by the Committee include analysis of large-scale land appropriations (2010), a guide to due diligence of agribusiness projects that affect land and property rights (2014), a study on the formalisation of land rights in developing countries (2015), a document promoting a land-based commons approach (2017), a guide to the issues surrounding young people's access to land (2020), and many other works and tools intended to improve our understanding and efforts to address land-related challenges in the global South. Full versions of all these outputs can be found on the "Land Tenure and Development"

portal (www.foncier-developpement.fr), which the Committee set up to provide access to quality information in this field.

**The UMR CESSMA** Centre for Social Science Studies on African, American and Asian Worlds is a joint research unit that brings together researchers and teacher-researchers from l'Université de Paris, l'Institut national des langues et civilisations orientales (Inalco) and l'Institut de recherche pour le développement (IRD). Its mission is to analyse the historical and spatial configurations of development and globalisation dynamics. The historians, geographers, sociologists, anthropologists, economists, demographers and urban planners who work in this unit share common social science practices as they conduct interdisciplinary and comparative studies and exchanges with scientific partners in their fields of study. Their research extends from Central and South America to Africa and the Arab world, South Asia, South-East Asia and East Asia.

**UMR Géographie-cités** is an interdisciplinary research centre with an open science perspective that generates and disseminates new knowledge, bodies of knowledge, expertise and methodological tools, and provides research-based training in territorial sciences. Taking space as its entry point, the centre uses analytical and visualisation tools to investigate and help improve the theoretical and methodological approaches to work on the social, political and economic changes that are occurring in our societies.

**UMR LATTS** is a multidisciplinary humanities and social sciences laboratory that specialises in cities and territories, public action and work. The researchers and teacher-researchers from CNRS, l'Ecole des Ponts ParisTech and l'Université Gustave Eiffel who work in this joint research unit analyse major societal transformations such as urban change, environmental crises, energy transitions and digital turning points through the prism of technical worlds, devices and infrastructures.