Seeking certainty and aggravating ambiguity - On property, paper and authority in Niger

The land tenure situation in rural Africa is often described as uncertain a nd insecure, and recent reforms have addressed this issue. Consequently, it is a paradox that measures taken to reduce the insecurity that rural peopl e face every day in fact often increase uncertainty, or at least reconfigur e it. Responses to this by local people and local political entrepreneurs v ary and raise fundamental questions about public authority and institutiona l competition. The informal recording of property transactions on paper seems to develop p roportionally to the states' generally less than successful efforts to form ally record the land tenure situation. In many African societies it is eith er illegal or practically impossible to acquire a formal deed to 'one's' la nd, either because the state considers itself to be the sole proprietor or because overly formalistic and cumbersome procedures prevent ordinary peopl e from acquiring such documents. Nonetheless, a wide variety of written doc uments recording property transactions exist in rural Africa. White these a re not deeds or contracts in the formal sense, informal practices of public validation by a variety of politico-legal institutions have developed. In the case of Niger, the promise of registration of customary land rights under the land tenure reform, the Rural Code, created a huge popular demand for registration. However, the state agencies' incapacity to meet this dem and opened the terrain for local institutional bricolage and competition. S uch local practices are technically non-legal but tolerated by the state, a nd are the way 'property' is produced. Consequently, the attempt to increas e security of tenure has the unintended aggregate result of accentuating th e uncertainty of authority: which institution can legitimately validate pro perty?