ABSTRACT
Land tenure (rural property rights) can be defined in a variety of ways, but is generally regarded to be ‘social relations about land’. One useful way to view land tenure is as a bundle of rights within a society or community. In such a bundle, rights can be added, removed or divided to create a very wide variety of different rights to land and land-based resources. While rights to land are often thought to be produced by titles, deeds, registries and leases, in reality these are artefacts of a system that involves, among other elements, enforcement, dispute resolution, evidence, identity, forms of logic, institutional formation and operation, derivation and maintenance of authority and legitimacy, the role of ‘community’, and most importantly trust in institutions (Bruce and Migot-Adholla, 1994; Bruce, 2000).
