Land and Leviathan: Local Politics and Land Tenure Reform Implementation in Rural Tanzania

Reforms aiming at the transformation of customary or communal institutions of rural property rights into systems of ownership operable through the market mechanism have gained prominence on contemporary development agendas and, since the 1990s, have been undertaken by over twenty African countries. Strategies and outcomes of these reforms, however, have varied significantly across diverse rural contexts throughout sub-Saharan Africa. The dissertation asks: How have global shifts in thinking about property relations played out within state and local institutions? How has the character of rural property rights reforms been shaped by the diverse local social and political contexts of their implementation in African countrysides? The analysis draws on institutionalist theories of state-formation, socio-cultural perspectives on agrarian change, and ten months of fieldwork in rural Tanzania to argue that differences in the organization of local authority over land within particular rural political ecologies determine the character and outcomes of property rights reforms across rural contexts within the same country and even district. Boone's (2003) analysis of the impact of communal structures on state strategies of rural institution-building, and Berry's (1993, 2002) arguments about the fluidity, negotiability, and contestation of African social institutions provide starting points for the analysis. Particular strategies of reform in Tanzania are situated within the country's own historical trajectory of agrarian political economic development before their implementation is analyzed within rural contexts differing in the relative centralization (Moshi District of Kilimanjaro Region) or decentralization (Bagamoyo District of Coast Region) of communal authority. Differences in the local organization of authority are shown to shape both the strategies of central reformers, as well as the ways in which local elites and producers have sought to contest, harness, and manage the reform process. Communal structures evolve in the face of new risks and opportunities and are argued to provide rural actors with different sets of tools in managing processes of agrarian change. Implications are drawn for understanding dynamics of rural commoditization, the character of political contestation in contemporary African countrysides, and the role not only of rural elites but of producers themselves in shaping outcomes of institutional change.Ph.D.2017-06-16 00:00:0