Paper short abstract:

Paper will examine shifting national policies pertaining to the rights of access to land in Tanzania with a focus on their impact on key constituents and on identifying the power and vested interests underlying these changes.

Paper long abstract:

Growing conflict and pressures from a plethora of competing internal and external interests in Tanzania's land are leading to the generation of new policies to set the terms and conditions for accessing and using land. Parameters are being prescribed for a host of key players including foreign and domestic investors, village and non-village rural residents, urban and non-urban cultivators and pastoralists. One issue is the continued erosion of village power over land issues. In August 2016, Tanzania released the first draft of a new national land policy. It proposed changes to the current two-tier system of titling distinguishing leasehold properties (typically in urban areas) from village properties (reserved for village residents), and to circumvent the power of village governments over land issues by instituting a central government-appointed commission to oversee rural land. In November, 2016, the government issued another draft. Some government officials claimed the first was a fraud. The second draft was less radical in its circumvention of village jurisdiction over land issues yet pointed to the same extant problems used to justify the more extreme changes in the first version. This raises the question of whether the government will use the final policy to produce operational orders along the lines of SPILL (Strategic Plan for Implementation of Land Laws), which was used to implement previous land laws, as well as revise existing land legislation and determine how revisions to the constitution approach land matters. We seek to identify the powers and vested interests underlying national land policy changes.