Re-Thinking the Land Ownership-Model in Malawi
The paper was presented during the African Centre for Cities International Conference 2018 in Cape Town (SA). It was produced in collaboration with Pilar Pérez Flores.
Countries in sub-Saharan Africa face increasingly forms of settlements in the urban and self-planned settlements1 in the peri-urban area, where the lack of security of tenure, land conflicts, and informal land markets overwhelm the local governments in their task of Urban Planning and providing necessary public services. We believe it is possible to find innovative, locally adapted perspectives leading towards a more efficient, social, and local management. It is crucial to discover and establish drivers for change while taking traditions, local culture, and current developments into account. This paper examines the potentials of some ideas and regulations in Mozambique as opportunities to tackle the land ownership in Malawi. Our research tries to cope with this task by looking into common procedures as well as general theoretical approaches and attempting to answer the question, how the need for security and sustainable development perspectives for the largely ‘informal’ population can be achieved.