Contesting land rights in a post-conflict environment: Tenure reform and dispute resolution in the centre-West region of Côte d'Ivoire

Large-scale land tenure reforms in post-conflict environments present significant challenges to and unique opportunities for peace processes. Fundamental to reconciliation, economic rehabilitation, and rural livelihood security, land and land tenure are essential components of post-conflict development. The importance of land to large-scale returns and sustainable peace is especially relevant in Côte d’Ivoire, where multiple waves of displacement linked to the 2002 civil war and 2010 post-election crisis exacerbated socio-economic and political relations between self-identified indigenous and migrant groups. Despite notable improvements in physical security, protracted land disputes throughout the cacao-producing region of the centre-West present a key obstacle to sustainable returns and long-term peace. Given a lack of institutional and financial capital, the current Government of Côte d’Ivoire has fallen back on a pre-war suite of tenure reforms designed to formalize customary land rights through mandatory certification and registration. Differing from previous critiques of the theoretical framework guiding the 1998 Rural Land Law, this paper uses field data to provide an overview of the main causes of land-related disputes, local mechanisms of dispute resolution, and current status of the 1998 Rural Land Law as it is being applied throughout the centre-West region of the country. Specifically, I argue that the prevalence of land-related disputes and unnecessarily complex nature of statutory reformsdissociated from the socio-political and economic foundation of the ‘tutorat’ system areundermining the tenure security of rural households.