Understanding community willingness to invest in land-use through their property rights and obligations

Kumasi, the garden city of Ghana is expanding into the peri-urban areas due to the pressure of urbanization that is ongoing all around the world. The land management of Ghana operates under dual land management, customary and state. In the peri-urban areas, the powerful land administration of the customary authorities and less active state governance is contributing towards unplanned rapid development resulting in the degradation and loss of green areas. In this process community is the most disregarding stakeholder but the most suffered one of the consequences of these unplanned development. Retrospective communal initiatives are common practise in the context of peri-urban Ghana to solve these consequences of unplanned growth. However, there is an existing ambiguity of individual ownership under the complex customary tenure and the objective of this study is to examine, compare and explain the relationship between the perceived and legal property rights and obligations of the community in customary tenure, and based on that, to identify and explain their willingness to invest in their identified balanced peri-urban land development.

The findings highlight how community status (being a settler of indigene) impact the perceived rights and obligations of the community. This study concludes that settlers identifies the need for more green for a balanced land use, while indigenous people prefer built area development and their investment decisions are influenced by their preference. This study recommends to address the perceived property rights and duties of both community and customary authority for land use policy formulation.