Out of Africa, on to Asia: The Land Tenure Journey of Dr. John Bruce
Interview by Selina Carter
As a young law school graduate, John Bruce joined the Peace Corps in Ethiopia in 1968, a move which ultimately transformed his career in land tenure. He became an expert on the intricacies of land tenure systems in Africa, later adding experiences in China and East Asia over several decades. As both a policy advisor and researcher, he taught at several institutions worldwide, including the Land Tenure Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Global Land Alliance sat down with Dr. Bruce as he reflected on lessons learned for the sector, past to present.
How did the Peace Corps shape your career in land tenure rights?
My Peace Corps experience led directly to my career in land tenure. I’m a lawyer by training. I had just graduated from law school [Columbia University, 1968], and at the time the Peace Corps had a “law program.” There were not a lot of countries that needed lawyers, but Ethiopia was one. Seven of us went and we were assigned to different ministries. I worked in Ethiopia’s Imperial Ministry of Land Reform and Administration from 1968-1970, after which I worked for USAID-Ethiopia on rural development and land reform policies up until the communist revolution in 1974. Meanwhile, I completed my S.J.D. [University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1976], which is a doctorate for conducting empirical research on law, in my case on customary land law in northern Ethiopia’s Tigray Province.
I then worked from 1975 to 1980 as the Ford Foundation representative in Sudan and lectured at the University of Khartoum Faculty of Law. I taught “Real Property” and “Customary Land Law” and directed the Faculty’s Sudan Customary Law Project, funded by Ford Foundation, recording and integrating customary law material into the curriculum and course readings.
After Sudan, I spent two decades at the Land Tenure Center [University of Wisconsin-Madison], starting as the Africa Program Coordinator, and eventually serving several stints as the Director. Then in 1999, I was recruited by the World Bank as a specialist on land law and tenure, and there my work focused on East Asia. I retired from the Bank in 2005, consulted for a decade and then spent three years in Beijing as an accompanying spouse and Visiting Professor at Renmin University, teaching a graduate seminar on Global Land Tenure Trends.
What did you learn early on about customary land tenure systems during your time in Africa?
While participating in a land tenure survey in Tigray Province of northern Ethiopia as a Peace Corps Volunteer, our team found as we went from village to village that there were fundamental differences in land tenure between the communities, even those next to one another, with the same cultures and land use patterns. This was a puzzle and became the topic of my doctoral dissertation research.
I learned that custom was much more flexible than I had imagined. I also learned that customary tenure varies a good deal: some systems are more communal, with land access granted by village or other community institutions, while others recognize family lineages as the source and authority regarding land tenure rights. The former systems have a “public” feel, the latter a “private” feel because the lineages own the land, though the community may have a limited role (such as in the resolution of land disputes). So, some customary systems feel public and communal, while others feel more like private ownership, and many communities have a hybrid system with some land under community ownership and other land under family lineage ownership.
I learned of this dynamic through my dissertation research in Tigray Province. Given the disastrous droughts and famines in Tigray Province, communities had learned to adjust land access rules to meet their immediate needs. This gave rise to variety of tenure options for these communities. The most common and oldest customary land tenure system was called risti, a lineage system in which farmers could inherit land in both male and female lines. This had worked well enough under “normal” circumstances, but when the country was hit hard by drought and famine, many risti areas were depopulated. In order to continue paying imperial taxes, communities created a new system to attract farmers who would move to the community, rebuild its agriculture, and share the community’s tax obligation. This alternative system was called chiguraf-gwoses (literally meaning “bring plows”), and under it, the community gave land to farmers with oxen and plows, regardless of their descent. Many communities first adopted the new system following the Great Famine of 1888-1892, but the tenure was said to have existed earlier in some communities in northern Tigray and in adjoining areas of Eritrea to the north.
Later, when communities had been rebuilt, some communities reverted to risti but others preferred to keep all or a part of their land under chiguraf-gwoses. In communities that returned to risti, the ambilineal inheritance system over time integrated the newcomers into the community’s risti system. The newcomers had no descent claims of their own, but they usually married local women, and their wife had risti claims to land through her father and mother. The children of the newcomer and his wife could inherit land from their mother.
Another variant developed referred to as wuste-risti chiguraf-gwoses, under which both descent and residence were required to claim land. Farmers could use these tenure differences among villages strategically. For instance, a man with risti rights in his original village, rights that required only descent from a first settler to obtain land, could move to another village where only residence was required, and so could hold land in both communities.
In your experience throughout various regions within Africa, what was the goal of national governments regarding land tenure rights?
Every country has a very distinctive history of land. You have recurring tenure issues, but every country presents them differently. Broadly stated, most African countries seek to provide security of tenure for their citizens to encourage investment and development, but they also often pursue other policies that endanger security of tenure, for instance granting to outside investors concessions in land occupied by local users.
In Ethiopia, the Ethiopian Civil Code (1960) provided recognition to the risti land tenure in northern parts of country, including Tigray Province. Thus, the land rights were officially based on customary land tenure. Then you might ask, how did the government deal with this type of system? Did it enforce it? Did it reform it? At the time I was there [late 1960s-early 70s], the government was just trying to understand it. My role was to help government think through the immediate implications of the local and regional diversity of land tenure systems in the country and how they should, in the long term, evolve into a viable national land tenure system. One of the more useful things I produced was a study of the very different role that land leasing played in the customary tenure systems of northern Ethiopia and the statutory private ownership system of southern Ethiopia.
In Sudan, while I was lecturing at the University of Khartoum, the faculty was working with an influential book by a former dean of the Faculty, “The Common Law in the Sudan” by Zaki Mustafa. He looked at the way English custom had become English common law, and he argued that a similar process was underway in Sudan. He sought to explain how to build, through the courts, a constructive relationship between the British colonial body of legislation in Sudan and the body of customary law. Customary land law and its interactions with statutory law had not been studied in most parts of the country. Our Customary Law Research Project would send recent graduates to rural courts to write reports about the local judicial processes regarding customary law. The objective was to document custom and integrate it into the teaching of law in Sudan, and into the body of formal law through judicial decisions.
In your experience in Sudan, how did Sharia law interact with customary tenure systems?
Sharia law came out of the commercial cities of Saudi Arabia at the time of the Prophet Mohammed. It has a clear concept of private ownership, resembling western law more than customary law. In the north of Sudan, which was and still is predominantly Muslim, customary and Sharia law had been interacting for centuries and were seen by the local people as a unified body of law. In the south, where most people are not Muslim, these two systems were competitors for influence. In the south, Sharia law conflicted with customary law in the same ways that western ownership conflicted with customary law. For example, land sales are accepted in Sharia but not at custom. Also, Sharia law was more accommodating to daughters with regards to inheritance than the largely patri-lineal customary systems in the South.
After several decades focusing on Africa, you switched to East Asia and China. How did those regions differ with respect to land tenure systems?
I switched to East Asia while at World Bank [1999-2005]. This was largely coincidental. There were several graduates of the University of Wisconsin-Madison working for the Bank in East Asia, specifically China, Cambodia, Laos, the Philippines, and Indonesia, and they encouraged me to work on their project teams. In Southeast Asia, one sees major overlaps in tenure issues with Africa, especially regarding the customary tenure traditions. China is very different, however. China went through the nationalization of land in order to pursue collective farming beginning in 1949, which by the 1980s was widely recognized to have failed. The monetization of land and its sale had been held back artificially as the rest of the economic system developed.
Many donors believe that marketability of land is the key to development, and registration to achieve marketability has been pursued in Africa since the early 20th century, first by some colonial governments and then by post-independence governments. International donors have supported those programs enthusiastically. I have made the case in my writing that in many cases in Africa this was premature, in that other conditions for a market in land did not exist. In China, it was the opposite: urban land had become readily marketable to long-term leases to business, but rural land under collective ownership was not allowed to be transferred. Rural land only became marketable when it became state land through expropriation by municipal government or other state agencies. Compensation to rural farmers was at very low rates. After it was acquired by the State, land was sold to developers at a much higher price, and the new urban users purchased a long-term marketable lease. This reaped astonishing amounts of money for local governments, far more than their official budgets. It is this revenue that has funded the massive infrastructural projects that have built modern urban China. Today, marketability is being gradually extended to selected categories of rural land in China, through both market and non-market mechanisms.
What was the “land rights” philosophy of the Communist Party of China, and how did the World Bank work with that?
Fascinatingly, the Communist Party of China has learned to manipulate the use of property rights to achieve its policy objectives. Ultimately, the Chinese state is committed to public ownership of land, which gives leaders the power to manipulate property rights over time. On the other hand, there is a deep understanding that to be productive, farmers need secure property rights. Today, as a corollary to its massive program of rapid urbanization, the government aims to shift the scale of farming from small farmers to large-scale farms. The large farms are being established on land rented from local communities and available because of the government’s promotion of rapid urbanization. The government is very unlikely to return to collective farming but can be expected to manipulate tenure for farmers to achieve policy ends.
The Chinese government determines land policy directions, and the role of the Bank was to analyze those policies and their implementation. The Bank tried to raise issues that government might have been neglecting and to influence procedures in the interest of fairness. But the Chinese were moving ahead with urbanization faster than the World Bank would have recommended. There has been a failure to think through and plan adequately for the shape and social character of rural China and the communities left behind there after urbanization. The shape of the new rural land tenure arrangements will only emerge gradually, but there will clearly be more large-scale farming by both private ventures and by state enterprises.
You saw the transition of land reform policies in the early 1960s until today. How has the paradigm shifted over the years?
Over the past 50 years, there have been two main kinds of reforms: 1.) redistributive reforms, and 2.) land tenure reforms.
1) In the case of redistributive reforms, in the 1970s people were looking at East Asian cases – South Korea, Japan, Taiwan – which had “land-to-the-tiller” programs which had gone well in terms of the impact on productivity. But there were wide regional differences. Africa was experiencing a generation’s worth of post-colonial land reforms. Some reforms were badly conceived or implemented, but they did not risk roll-back because they were racially based – Africans were taking back land from Europeans, with Africans having huge political majorities over the remaining white settlers. Productivity impacts of the African reforms have often been weak due to the failure by governments to provide not just access to land but to other necessary services and inputs.
Latin America has a more sobering experience, given its significant (and bloody) revolts and land grabs, particularly in Central America. Kennedy’s Alliance for Progress began an effort by the U.S. to promote land reform in a peaceful way. But land reform was complicated because there were many latifundia, which had become large integrated farms, already mechanized. There were two options: to a) break them up into smallholdings for beneficiary families, or b) to give them to groups of beneficiaries to be run as production cooperatives. Both options posed difficulties, at least by comparison to the East Asia model where you simply titled the tenant for the land he was already using. Within USAID, people had divergent opinions about whether the U.S. should even tackle land reform.
By the 1980s, the U.S. had backed off from land reform, perhaps more than it should have. By then the World Bank was pushing a promising model it called “community-based land reform.” This was a market-mechanism land reform in which land was not expropriated, but rather purchased on the market by groups of beneficiaries with public funding. This didn’t go very well in Latin America because it was a technocratic solution to highly unequal land ownership. Many traditional supporters of redistributive reforms see land reform as a tool with the political potential to break the power of a land-owning elite. The Bank’s “community-based” model effectively allowed the land-owning class to keep political power. In Africa, however, there were a few successes, such as Malawi, where a local program allowed villages to purchase land from deteriorating commercial farms still held by colonial corporations and adjacent to their villages.
2.) In the case of land tenure reforms, these are reforms that change the property rights systems themselves. For example, a popular reform program has been to implement land registration programs aimed at “overnight” conversion to a private ownership system, based on the western model. Unfortunately, this was a simplistic approach and premature in many situations. It was assumed that land tenure was the “bottleneck” whose reform would allow development to occur. In fact, because holders had no desire to sell or mortgage their lands, they were inclined to continue traditional tenure practices. The normative confusion that resulted from two systems trying to operate over the same land left landholders feeling less rather than more secure. For example, in many along the Nile in northern Sudan, property rights were “registered” in the first decades of the 20th century, but by 1980 in the local court houses which held the registers, boxes of registers were dusty and crowned with pigeon nests. No one had registered a transaction or an inheritance for many decades. Ideally, local communities should themselves make the decision as to when and how their land should be registered.
Broadly, most programs have sought to provide better security of tenure, which is useful, but the equally important objective of better land access for the poor has received much less attention.
What was the Land Tenure Center?
The Land Tenure Center (LTC) was established in 1962 at the University of Wisconsin-Madison with the help of USAID, but it wound down after 2003. It was always heavily dependent on USAID funding. The university distributed the substantial overhead generated by the Center among other university entities, primarily in the College of Agriculture. The Center’s only funding from the university came from the College’s Office of International Programs, which itself had fairly limited funds.
The Center was well-conceived as an interdisciplinary research center mobilizing the expertise within the university to understand land tenure issues and advise USAID on land tenure issues. The Center was always seen by both UW-Madison and USAID as a project, not an institution. The overhead could have created such an institution, but the university chose not to do so, and indeed limited the Center’s ability to raise funding from other sources by assigning it a low priority in the scheme of research applications to foundations coordinated by the university.
In its early years, the Center’s operations were largely in Latin America. This work coincided with the Vietnam War, and working with government was not popular on university campuses. Land tenure is politically sensitive territory and the Center sometimes found itself caught in the middle, with Students for a Democratic Society throwing rocks through the windows of its campus office one year and the Heritage Foundation attacking the Center the following year for what it viewed as “leftist” leanings toward land reform. In spite of the controversial nature of its work, the Center and its publications became the primary source of information and insights on land tenure in developing countries for four decades.
Why did the Center decline? In its early decades, the Center was able to jointly develop research programs with USAID staff. But the Reagan Administration considered long-running grants programs to universities as “entitlements” and pushed to discontinue them. Contracts for research programs were developed by USAID in secret and then competitively bid upon. The decline of researcher involvement in setting research priorities resulted in a decline in faculty interest in participation in the research opportunities provided by the Center and as a result, the Center began a decline. In its later years, there were struggles within the university for control of the Center. By its 50th anniversary it was largely defunct. USAID and the University of Wisconsin-Madison both missed an opportunity to build a durable institution.
New centers of tenure expertise have emerged. Landesa is the most significant locus of land tenure applied research in the US today. The World Bank does not have a land tenure department but does have staff with considerable experience with land policy and administration, scattered throughout the Bank but networked through a voluntary thematic group on land. The Global Land Alliance is doing a remarkable job at collaborating with researchers and governments in developing countries in defining objectives, generating global data and disseminating key information on land tenure internationally. But I don’t think there is a single institute today that integrates research and teaching on land tenure rights in the way LTC did. Its courses on land tenure, informed by applied research of those teaching the courses, trained a generation of land tenure experts for both in the US and many developing countries
What is a major lesson you want to share with policymakers today?
Land alone isn’t always the problem. Many development practitioners have thought of land tenure as a “bottleneck”. But more often, tenure is incorrectly identified as the primary problem, and even where it is a problem, tenure systems can evolve to meet new needs. The introduction of cocoa into Nigeria and Ghana as a major cash crop in the late 1800s initially faced a lack-of-access to land on tenure to achieve required level of security for a tree crop; but the system gradually adjusted by allowing private ownership including sale and mortgaging of the tree, and over time, of land itself.
I want to also flag two gaps in our consideration of land tenure and policy: one is the lack of an adequate knowledge of domestic US land tenure issues by most international experts on land tenure. We would be more valuable in developing context if we had a better understanding of our own tenure history. A second gap is urban land tenure and the process of urbanization of rural land. It is remarkable that nine-tenths of all work in this area addresses rural land tenure, with far less done on urban land tenure.
There has been some important progress on policy. The Voluntary Guidelines on Tenure [2012] are a significant step forward, even though they’re voluntary. There is a consensus for user tenure, that private users with security of land tenure perform best. But on the fundamental issue of private or public ownership, there is no such consensus, nor do the Guidelines define a critical term –“legitimate” – used for land rights which deserve recognition and protection by the state. Where the Guidelines give an answer to the basic policy question, the question of change strategy remains: “How do you get from here to there?” Developing progressive land policies and programs while doing justice to the special circumstances of each country and respecting local values remains challenging work.
What do you think about the role of technology in land tenure today?
My hunch is that we have developed the technological side of this field more than the policy side. We have tools to expeditiously and cheaply implement ideas, which is positive, but I think that this sometimes creates a temptation to jump into large projects that might not be well considered in terms of concept and objectives, or even values. I’m not anti-technology, but technology must serve values and policy.