Can Community Land Trusts Enhance Urban Land Governance in Kenya?

Abstract

The struggle for land constitutes a major challenge in urban governance in Kenya today. The sheer pace of the country’s urbanization far outstrips the ability of conventional state and market mechanisms to accommodate the ever-expanding urban population. Most affected in the ensuing scramble for urban space are the poor. Even when they manage to access urban land, low-income households can hardly retain such land on a long-term basis, owing to market vicissitudes and unfriendly government policies. Accordingly, poor households remain shunted to the fringe of urban society as it were, excluded from systematic access to shelter and livelihood opportunities. To expand the poor’s access to urban land and housing, Kenyan planners have experimented with communal forms of property modelled on the community land trust (CLT). By design, CLTs alienate land from the market and assign it to defined communities in perpetuity, thereby aiding long-term shelter provision and community development. The CLT arrangement however brings with it new institutional arrangements that challenge the long-held frameworks of land governance in Kenya. By confronting statutory regimes of land tenure premised on individual property and transferring land management to communities, CLTs facilitate community agency based on social cohesion and associational modes of (re)production that are so crucial in propping up poor households. Using the case of the Tanzania-Bondeni Community CLT recently implemented in Voi town, this paper highlights the institutional bottlenecks to CLT implementation and explores how the new model of land ownership can be mobilized to address the low-income housing problem in the country. Specifically, I address key governance issues that constitute a barrier to wider CLT adoption and explore institutional and other reforms necessary to integrate the CLT approach as a major component of the country’s urban land governance framework.