A neo-institutional analysis of alternative land registration systems in Tanzania: The cases of Babati and Iringa districts

Despite the availability of new technical tools and organizational adaptations to improve the efficiency and quality of land registration processes, few insights exist on how effective such reforms are. This article takes a closer look at such alternatives by carefully examining how they differ from existing processes and by assessing to which extent these truly enhance land tenure security. The investigation relies on a neo-institutional analysis of land administration processes. This analytical choice zooms in to institutional practices, behavior and effects. We chose to examine empirically non-state-led land formalization processes in the Babati and Iringa districts in Tanzania. The observed and aggregated findings on perceptions, beliefs and values indicate that institutional changes have indeed occurred, but that these changes with new technologies have not significantly led to a fundamental decrease in transaction costs and improvement in tenure security. Instead, costs have not persisted in monetary value but in terms of uncertainty due unrealized benefits of formalization. Most tenants with so-called Certificates of Customary Right of Occupancy (CCRO) have less benefited from accessing loans, formalization has not freed rural people from land disputes and still people have immense trust in customary practices. Explanatory factors reside around low value of produced CCROs, bank’s mistrust of CCROs because they not linked to national land management systems. Also, approaches of formalization apart from being replacement in nature, they are donor dependent and are in conflict with customary perceptions of security of land tenure systems. These outcomes suggest that the reforms have indeed only established new institutional forms but that these are not sustained nor integrated in customary procedures. Land tenure security is therefore not sufficiently improving. These findings call for a more detailed evaluation of the assumed benefits of the technological and organizational set-ups and of the assumed causal relation between land registration and tenure security.