The long and winding road of the land reform in Madagascar since 2005: governance, implementation, and outcomes

Securing land rights is a matter of documents but also a matter of institutions, governance, and processes. In Madagascar, the land registration reform initiated in 2005 relies on ad hoc decentralized land offices at the commune level (CLOs). Based on a processual analysis over a nearly 20 years span, we focus on the CLOs, as an intermediate governance body, to jointly study its technical, institutional and political opportunities and challenges, and to highlight the tensions and complementarities between stakeholders at the national level (state, donors, civil society) and local level (state and non-state authorities, households). The winding trajectories of the reform implementation help us understand: (i) the irregular paces and patterns of certification, alternating between on-demand and quasi-systematic registration, (ii) the importance given to first-time registration to the detriment of recording subsequent transfers, with a risk of reversion to informality, and iii) the persistence of institutional pluralism, with renewed complementarities between formal and semi-formal documents. While the global outreach is still modest at the national level, the upside is that it benefits vulnerable groups, including female land-owners (either household heads or married women with individual plots). A major downside is that although joint titling is a legal possibility, female co-owners are still mostly invisible.