Indigenous Informal Land Markets, Land Banking And Land Values: A National Case Of Ghana

Land banking practices can fail in efficiently controlling the value of land. These failures stem from the difficulty in reducing speculative holdings to levels exceeding the size of the banked lands. Such underlining traits of the practice have been drawn from public land banking practices in formal land market settings. Public practices are markedly different to private and quasi-public land banking practices in an indigenous informal land market. Consequently, this paper explores how indigenous informal land markets are influenced by private land banking practices and land values under new land tenure regimes post-Ghana's land reforms. Semi-structured interviews with thirty-three participants made up of experts and stakeholders were drawn from four case studies within the Ghanaian indigenous informal land market. We find that land bankers are banking large tracts of indigenous informal lands as capital investments for profits through land dispositions. This is different from the possession of land banks as a production factor for their housing development moves suggested to indigenous heads. The paper recommends a revisit of discussions on the enforcement and monitoring of the processes required under the lands commission guidelines for large-scale land transactions.