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management authority of the Village Council. All our three villages have beenthrough a village border demarcation, but since not having gone through a formal landuse planning exercise what land belongs to whom and for what purpose it is intendedfor within the village is a lot less clear. The lack of deeds to individual households‟agricultural land plays a big part in this unclarity and as a result many haveexperienced quarrels over their agricultural boarders and many are less willing toinvest as much time and effort into their agricultural land as they are not quite surewhere their borders go and due to the insecurity of losing their land. Such quarrels wewere told about in all villages, however it seemed more pressing in the case ofMasugu. Masugu was also a special case when it came to legal rights to land, whichcaused for great uncertainty among its villagers. Because not only does it lie partly ona former sisal plantation now owned by the state, but it also in the not so distant past(1960s) had most of its land owned by a businessman involved in growing papaya.After the collapse of these two plantations many simply occupied the area and startedcultivating, however many respondents told they were afraid that the state wouldcome and take the land away from them. In addition as one respondent from Masugustated the land rights are so uncertain that he is discouraged to make big investmentsinto the land in order to create more output. As he said, although referring to landwhich is rented, if he put a lot of effort into the land and got quite a good output, if theland owner sees the high yields he will then usually take back the land thinking it isvery fertile and attempt to produce as much. It is also not only in terms of agriculturalland where there are unclear boundaries and use rights.More generally the sometimes ambiguous distinction between Village Land andGeneral Land has caused for more conflicts, especially between farmers andpastoralists, and again, particularly in Masugu. And as one responded said: “there areconflicts with the Massai, since pastoralist‟s raids their crops and destroy their landsclose to the forest. Their animals also destroy the places they use to make charcoalwithin the forest. They then have to chase them away”. The source of such conflictsover land can be traced back to the colonial era (see Benjaminsen, Maganga et al.2009). Such conflicts are usually dealt with through formal institutions, were severeconflicts have been taken to court, either to the Ward Tribunal Councils or throughMagistrate Courts of Law. The outcomes of these trials have in many instances notchanged anything though and substantial tension still exists. In addition, the local212