Land tenure formalisation as institutional transition in African cities: a critical examination.

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My interdisciplinary research focuses on land institutions and processes of land tenure formalisation, addressing questions of lasting importance for urban development and poverty alleviation in rapidly urbanising cities of the Global South. With roughly 1 billion people living in unplanned settlements, international organisations and governments of developing countries promote land registration (formalisation) to address the challenges of rapidly urbanising cities. The net benefits from formalisation policies remain unclear. In fact, many titling projects have encountered challenges of implementation, including the low uptake of land titles, with large sunk costs for governments. Thus, there is a need for more empirical research studying the local demand for improved property rights in specific spatial-temporal contexts, and how this could be met through policy initiatives. My research investigates titling initiatives in Dar es Salaam (Tanzania) analysing the motivations for low uptake of titles and the processes leading to the construction of a formal property system. Drawing on extensive fieldwork and mixed-methods analysis, my research finds that social interactions among neighbours and with the local public authority mediate the choices and the processes of formalisation. In collaboration with local students, I have collected and produced a wide set of data including administrative cadastral data, primary survey data, in-depth interviews, ethnographic observations and experimental data. Overall, my research provides important methodological, theoretical, and empirical contributions, resulting in policy recommendations, which I have disseminated to policymakers and other stakeholders.More specifically, my work finds that first, formalisation policies rally considerable social support in Dar es Salaam, despite of low uptake. Second, choices of formalisation with interim property rights are interdependent in the population, as plot owners refer to the behavior and advice of others (neighbours and community leaders) when deciding whether to uptake their titles. Third, social interactions also mediate the process of formalisation: informal dynamics of property recognition by local leaders and neighbours are essential to legitimise and operationalise the instruments of formal property: the cadastre and the survey map. Fourth, local leaders have accurate knowledge on the local demand for formalisation in their neighbourhoods. This could be leveraged to inform more inclusive projects of formalisation. The Fellowship will help me to develop an academic career by further establishing a track-record of publications, a research network, and an innovative interdisciplinary academic profile at the intersection of urban and institutional research, through an ambitious, yet achievable programme of engagements with academic and wider audiences. Crucially, these activities will generate higher impact from my existing work and opportunities for future research. Outputs will include a set of publications in top-tier journals, conferences, seminars, meetings with policymakers and other project stakeholders, and blog posts. To explore the possibility of future comparative, interdisciplinary and policy-relevant research collaborations, I will consolidate existing and new networks with i) local academics at the Universities of Dar es Salaam, Nairobi, and Kampala; ii) academics in related fields both within and outside the LSE; iii) policy-makers at all levels of governments and other project stakeholders in Tanzania. Moreover, I will write my next three-year project for funding applications to the British Academy, the Leverhulme Trust and the ESRC. Finally, the fellowship will enable me to extend the existing theoretical, and methodological aspects of my existing research through a short-term visiting period at the Centre for Social Norms and Behavioral Dynamics (University of Pennsylvania), classes and short courses at the LSE.