Paper short abstract:

The paper presents an innovative framework to study how de-facto land regulations produce social (in)justice from the perspective of African urban residents. It discusses challenges and proposes novel concepts to examine how residents understand and navigate social (in)justice in land governance.

Paper long abstract:

Investigating the politics of social (in)justice in African cities, this paper focuses on one understudied source of power imbalances and social (in)justice: the de facto rules-of-the-game of informal land governance in unplanned urban settlements. As known, communities often self-regulate around issues of land ownership, transfer, development, and use, drawing on complex configurations of non-statutory, quasi-statutory and statutory law, norms, and customs. However, we lack an analytic framework to study how these de-facto regulations work on the ground and are perceived by residents, especially the most vulnerable (e.g. women and migrants), regarding the equality and inequality of outcomes. Proposing the formalisation of rights and institutions, the dominant policy approach relies upon a profound lack of knowledge on the diversity and the performance of informal governance systems in various contexts. Since these policies ignore the local needs of residents, they often reinforce dispossession and injustice. Drawing on interdisciplinary fields, the paper presents a new epistemology of informal land governance with an explicit focus on social (in)justice, which will support researchers and policymakers to acquire more fine-grained knowledge on informal governance systems, their perceived (in)equality and diverse policy needs in African cities. In so doing, the paper addresses key questions of this panel: first, it discusses the epistemological and empirical challenges of understanding how residents construct notions of social (in)justice in informal land governance. Second, by introducing notions of ‘negotiated justice’ and ‘tolerated injustice’, the framework provides novel concepts to further understand how residents navigate processes and structures of social (in)justice.