The role of chiefs in large-scale land acquisitions for jatropha production in Ghana: insights from agrarian political economy

Ghana experienced a surge in large-scale land acquisitions in the past decade spearheaded by the bioenergy crop jatropha. To accommodate such acquisitions, small and medium-sized land holdings were consolidated to develop large parcels of land that could accommodate large-scale investments. Chiefs have been an important player in these processes as they are supposed to be the custodians of land in Ghana. However, they often engage with such land acquisition processes in a counterproductive manner, deeply affecting their outcomes. Chiefs often act as the gatekeepers of large-scale land acquisitions, helping foreign donors/investors and the state steer the institutional landscape of land tenure, which is not only complicated but also prone to social conflicts. In order to unravel the exact roles that chiefs have played in such processes (and the motivations behind their actions) we adopt an agrarian political economy framework based on the five key questions: “who owns what”, “who does what”, “who gets what”, “who interacts with whom” and “participation by whom in what”. To answer these questions, we conduct interviews with chiefs, experts and local households around five collapsed jatropha plantations in Ghana. Our empirical analysis suggests that chiefs often went beyond their customary roles as land custodians, by occasionally acting as land owners/sellers, expropriators, negotiators, receivers of compensation, and sources of conflict. These roles are to an extent an outcome of the weak, undocumented and largely discretionary land administration system of Ghana, which allows chiefs benefit by bypassing both customary and statutory land laws. Chiefs were often motivated by expected economic gains for themselves at the expense of the communal interests. On some cases this unconstructive role catalysed the collapse of the jatropha investments. These suggest the need for deep land policy reforms within the land administration system of Ghana. While the recent adoption of guidelines for large-scale land acquisitions promoted by the government of Ghana is a good start, land policy reforms should go deeper. Further reforms would be needed to strengthen the current legislation in terms of harmonizing all land laws, as well as outlining explicit directives for land negotiations, compensation (including defining the rightful recipients of compensation) and the effective evaluation of large-scale land acquisitions.