CONCEPTS
Tenure in communal property institutions in South Africa and other developing countries is important to the lives of millions of people. Many people avoid working with tenure issues because they are difficult to understand. In Leap we have learned that we need to think clearly about what we are doing in order to do good fieldwork. We have spent a number of years developing ways of thinking about tenure that we believe helps to work with the complexities in practical ways.
Conceptual basics
Focus on tenure security
Secure tenure gives people certainty about what they and others can do with their property. This certainty creates a base for sustainable livelihoods and development.
For this reason, securing tenure rights should be the first concern when establishing, assessing, or building the capacity of communal property institutions. It is also important when considering developmental interventions that relate to land, natural resources, housing, environmental management, livelihood improvement.
However, thinking about tenure quickly get complex. Leap offers the following thinking about tenure and communal property institutions.
What is tenure security about?
Secure tenure is about:
- Defendable rights and enforceable duties to property and benefits flowing from it
- Procedures, rules and systems for managing these property rights and duties
- Clarity about where authority resides in relation to these rights, duties and procedures
- The absence of contradiction between laws and practices governing rights, duties and the tenure system
The Bill of Rights in the South African Constitution places a high value on equity, democracy and accountability. The challenge is to make these realizable commitments rather than paper obligations. These values are important because they operate to ensure that the tenure rights of all people are certain and secure.
The Leap conceptual framework
Leap develop a set of indicators, which lie at the heart of a broader framework which we use in planning and analysis, to help us to
- understand past and current tenure situations - to recognize what is important and therefore to give direction in our attempts to support communal property institutions better;
- hold useful conversations with a range of people about tenure issues;
- organize our thoughts when we are writing.
Where to start in fieldwork, analysis and writing about tenure can be daunting. A theoretical framework gives us tools to help decide where and how to start in understanding how secure tenure is.
Leap's framework has four conceptual blocks.
- To give us a broad picture in which to think about tenure security, we look at rights and rights holders.
- What are we looking for? What is important? We use the indicators to help us assess how secure tenure is.
- Where do we look? Tenure becomes real as we talk about land rights administration processes, and this is where we look in order to apply the indicators to see if tenure security is increasing or decreasing.
- How do we look? We think about institutional arrangements, in order to understand where particular links enable or block tenure security, where links are missing, or where links seem to be appropriate or inappropriate.