Why Differing Patterns of Land Rights Transformation and Land Conflict among the Yoruba of Nigeria?

Abstract

"The varying impacts of indigenous ordering principles on land rights transformation in African communities have been generally neglected in scholarly works. Despite strong reasons to believe that indigenous ordering principles can be hugely important in explaining a wide variety of outcomes, extensive attention in property rights research has gone to models of efficiency, the relative power of actors, distributional conflict, colonial legacies, and the role of African national governments as possible explanations. Based on a priori assumptions, studies on the Yoruba of Nigeria have treated Yoruba indigenous institutions as similar, with scholarship on African indigenous institutions treating these indigenous institutions as wholly useful for governance and property relationship reform. Yet, it is puzzling why changes in the distribution of land rights in Yoruba communities of Nigeria have led to differing patterns of violence. The main focus of this paper is to attempt to resolve this puzzle by analyzing how indigenous ordering principles in three relatively similar Yoruba communities of Nigeria--Abeokuta, Ibadan, and Ile-Ife--have influenced land rights transformation to lead to different patterns of violence. This study uses data from archival research, and unstructured and semi-structured interviews."