Review of Sandra Evers, Marja Spierenburg, and Harry Wels (eds.), ‘Competing Jurisdictions: Settling land claims in Africa’

Access to land and natural resources represents the key element of rural peoples’ livelihoods. Inherited and acquired rights to land and natural resources are their major entitlements and are integral to their experience of production. Claims of access and rights to land and natural resources characterize the everyday struggle of rural people to improve their living conditions. Guaranteeing the satisfaction of these claims and rights represents a challenge for development policies, particularly since these claims and rights are rarely uncontested. Thus, finding a political answer to these demands requires a deep understanding of the complex web of rights and claims, actors and institutions and the competition between them. Indeed, ‘competing’ – competing rights, competing claims, etc. - is a word which has recently attracted the attention of several analysts. Competing jurisdictions is the title chosen by the editors of this volume (which collects together a selection of the papers presented at a conference held at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam in 2003) to capture a sense of how the different actors (institutional and informal, individual and collective, local and national) are settling land claims in a number of case-studies in Africa. It also explicitly examines the ideologies and narratives that are being used in this process.