Due to the lack of technical and financial capacities and the (still) limited
discretionary powers of the young West African municipalities, the objectives
of land use planning are becoming less ambitious and more realistic.
The former holistic GT approach on village level, covering the whole space
and evaluating all potential uses, is replaced by an approach focusing on
articulated priorities of relevant user groups and selected problems or
land use conflicts in sore need of a solution. In this context, “local agreements”
are at present one of the most popular yet most adapted form of
land use planning for West African municipalities (see 2.5 and 3.10). However,
all actors concerned recognize that local agreements will have more
of a transitional value, serving to bridge the existing legal vacuum. What
all West African countries still lack is the real “transfer of competencies
and financial resources” to the newly elected local bodies, i.e. the downright
devolution of key powers and functions such as land administration
and natural resource management. Another major challenge is the
juxtaposition of statutory and customary land tenure systems that causes
multiple allocations of lands and promotes increases in large-scale land
acquisitions and leases (see 1.1, 2.4 and next section on Southern Africa).