Statutory Land Control and the Small holder Land System in Kenya: A study of land control in the Nyanza Sugar belt.

Abstract

It is generally acknowledged that insecure and incomplete property rights have large effects on the use and management of watershed resources. The standard policy response to this problem is to privatize farm land, declare riverine areas to be public property, and establish a set of restrictions on the use of both private and pub lic land. This paper presents a more nuanced concept of catchment property rights, drawing upon key concepts from watershed hydrology and the multidisciplinary social science of property rights. We present preliminary results from a study of the Nyando river basin in western Keny a. The implications are that policy reforms aimed at catchment property rights need to rec ognize the complexity and inter-connections that make up hydrologic catchments, give greater pr iority to key catchment resources such as domestic water and sediment filters, recognize the key links between water and land rights, and devise ways to harmonize the multiple sources of aut hority that govern the use of management of watershed resources.