| dc.description.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. | en_US |
