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Land Tenure Reforms and Social Transformation in Botswana: Implications for Urbanization.

Land reforms, with the majority bordering on full scale revision of tenure rules have become a recurrent theme in the agenda of most African states since attaining political independence. For southern Africa, and a number of former colonies where the white settler populations acting in concert with the colonial administrations dispossessed the majority of the native populations of their land, the reforms have taken the form of restitution and redistribution of land. Unlike these types of reforms in southern African and because the Bechuanaland Protectorate was not a settler colony, Botswana has framed its land tenure and land use reforms with an eye on the problems associated with common property management. My dissertation evaluates the effects of Botswana's land reforms on social transformations in Kweneng District by carefully investigating their impacts on households' livelihood strategies, kinship ties, and social balance of power on one hand, and the implications of these transformations for urbanization on the other.While acknowledging the good intentions of the government as encapsulated in the objectives of the reform policies, it is my contention that several areas which were never taken into account during the formulation of these policies have been adversely impacted. Unfortunately, the unintended consequences have overshadowed the targeted ends of the reforms. These results are visible in the contemporary family and kinship structure, the chieftaincy institution, livelihood systems in livestock and arable agriculture, administration of justice, and the phenomenon of urbanization.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:arizona.edu/oai:arizona.openrepository.com:10150/196133
Date January 2006
CreatorsIjagbemi, Bayo
ContributorsPark, Thomas, Park, Thomas, Lansing, Stephen, Killick, David, Baro, Mamadou
PublisherThe University of Arizona.
Source SetsUniversity of Arizona
LanguageEnglish
Detected LanguageEnglish
Typetext, Electronic Dissertation
RightsCopyright © is held by the author. Digital access to this material is made possible by the University Libraries, University of Arizona. Further transmission, reproduction or presentation (such as public display or performance) of protected items is prohibited except with permission of the author.

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