Abstract: (Circa 100 – 150 words is preferable)In 1999, Tanzania enacted a basic new land law in the form of the Land Act and the Village Land Act. The latter lays out the legal framework and procedures for most of Tanzania’s rural land to henceforth be governed through a community-based land tenure management system. This devolves authority over land administration, land management and dispute resolution to the community level. This paper aims to provide a very simple but comprehensive explanation of the Village Land Act, which came into effect in May 2001. It includes a list of questions and answers about the new law, which were originally for Tanzanian District Councils as base material upon which they developed simple material aids and guidelines for villagers.

On this CD Rom you will find full text of key publications of IIED's Strategies, Planning and Assessment Programme (SPA), and its predecessor, the Environmental Planning Group (1993-2002). Included are the full texts of all the reports in the Environmental Planning Issues series and other documents covering methods, approaches and policy lessons.

This report examines the diverse arrangements by which people gain access to land and trees, through a system of rental, loans, sharecropping, mortgage and guardianship contracts. The terms and conditions are subject to negotiation according to people and place. Shortage of credit, the withdrawal of government support to agriculture, and absence of legal framework are important factors in generating such institutional innovation. High levels of population pressure, peri-urban growth and shortage of productive soils have generated demand for land and palm tree stands have also become subject to market transactions. People combine several contracts to assure their subsistence needs, and diversification of incomes. Such arrangements are linked to the broader web of relations of kinship and patronage. There is, nevertheless, a move towards greater individualisation of land relations, with increasing tensions between those who control land, and those seeking land. Written ‘contracts’ between parties to such arrangements are becoming common as a means of increasing security, despite such informal local practices having no legal recognition. This paper forms part of a broader programme of research work undertaken jointly by the UK and French governments on Land Tenure and Resource Access in West Africa.

Pastoralists in Niger are mobilising in an attempt to affirm their rights to home grazing territories. Their associations will be involved in consultations about the draft Pastoral Code, which should be written over the next three years, and it is their hope that this opportunity to re-examine weak or contradictory points in the legislation will improve the status of grazing lands. This paper describes the strategies used by pastoralists over the last ten years to make their tenure to land and other resources more secure and, by reviewing the law as it stands, asks how best such rights can be reinforced by legislation.