Global Compact International Yearbook Ausgabe 2013

ight, and the basis for a stable and growing economy. Insecure
property rights undermine livelihoods, investment, and foster
conflict and violence. The roots of this failure to recognize local
land rights and to maintain overly centralized tenure over
forests, wildlife, and other natural resources is an artifact of
colonial and post-colonial history. The colonial state claimed
ownership over land and resources as a central element of
imposing political and economic control over African societies.
Post-independence African states maintained this order in the
interest of centralized, often socialist nation-building creeds,
or in many instances to simply ease governing elites’ access
and control over the most valuable resources in a country.
State control over land and natural resources has been a core
aspect of modern Africa’s political economy, whereby governance
has largely revolved around the competition between
various elite factions for exploitation and capture of public
assets. Often land has been among the most valuable of those
assets, with state-linked elites often privately amassing land
or, more recently, natural resource concessions.
These political-economic dynamics and constellations of interests
have strongly worked against the interests of rural development,
natural resource conservation, and democratization
in Africa for the past 30 years. Rural citizens have long been
deprived rights over the natural resources that their livelihoods
depend on. This excludes them from opportunities to partner
with external investors and to benefit from the development
of new value chains and enterprise opportunities. By depriving
rural communities of property rights and control over
the economic value of natural resources, incentives for local
communities to conserve those resources are eroded. This is
a major factor underlying high rates of rural deforestation in
many African countries, as well as the uncontrolled illegal
hunting that has greatly depleted wildlife in many areas.
Risks and challenges
The current global land rush thus brings into stark relief a
number of fundamental contradictions and sources of conflict
that characterize natural resource governance in Africa today.
Even as Africa’s natural assets increase in value and generate
higher levels of interest and investment, both domestically
and globally, these market trends may create further incentives
for national elites to resist granting local groups more
control over these resources, or to recognize local customary
property rights. At the same time, though, if greater rights to
land and resources are not granted to local people, the stage
will be set for increased conflicts over these resources in the
future. When governments grant land to investors that in fact
– if not in law – is used by and belongs to local communities,
conflict is inevitable.
Sometimes these conflicts around land and resources play
a major role in the fate of entire nations; the long series
of conflicts in Sudan and ultimate independence of South
Sudan largely revolved around control over land and natural
resources. More recently, the 2009 uprising and coup that led
to regime change in Madagascar was at least influenced by
the previous government’s decision to grant up to half of the
country’s remaining arable land to a South Korean company.
Even where such large-scale violence and political instability
is avoided, struggles over land rights are increasingly taking
center stage in African politics. In Kenya, for example, land
was one of the central issues in the constitutional reform
process that arose in order to address the violence that took
place across the country following the disputed 2007 general
election. When the country passed its new constitution in
August 2010, land reforms were among the most prominent
features, in particular the provisions that reclassify “trust
lands” – which had been held by local governments and
widely mismanaged – as “community lands” to be held more
directly by local-level groups of people. These lands comprise
about 70 percent of the total land area of the country.
For private investors in agriculture, forestry, tourism, and
other renewable resource industries, these dynamics create
substantial risks. Many private investments in these land-based
activities in Africa today are taking place in a context of contested
property rights and weak governance. This creates risks,
both financial and reputational, for companies undertaking
projects on the ground, as well as for their financial investors
and stakeholders. The underlying source of risk is that many
More than 75 % of all the world’s rhino today are found in South
Africa. World Wildlife Fund (WWF) urges all South Africans to be
proud of the natural heritage.
54
Global Compact International Yearbook 2013