The stakes for land tenure issues in Africa today are high and the source of increasing conflict. The continuing gap between legislation and local norms for access to and control of land and resources places most rural populations in a situation of legal insecurity, which favours conflicts and land hoarding. Indeed, due to this plurality of norms, different stakeholders can often claim rights to the same piece of land in the name of various different rules and types of legitimacy. In addition, many parties play, formally or informally, a role in land arbitration, increasing the complexity of the situation. Despite considerable progress, land tenure security for rural populations remains a nagging question and an economic issue, as well as a citizenship issue.

Neither the "top down" attempts to promote private property nor the calls to restore "traditional", sometimes idealised, management take into account current realities. The challenge is to invent land regulation modes that take note of the plurality of norms, are based on local land tenure realities, and succeed in more harmoniously combining local and governmental modes of regulation, and reconciling practices, legitimacy, and legality. Since the early 1990s, numerous countries have undertaken to reform their laws and launched field operations in this direction.

GRET contributes to these evolutions through applied research, training and expertise.

GRET has undertaken a series of applied research and expertise projects on land tenure security since 1995 in collaboration with social science research on land issues. This is a finalised research approach, in partnership, that makes use of the accomplishments of the most recent land tenure research and operational know-how to elaborate policy recommendations and operational tools.

Various projects have been undertaken, most in the framework of Franco-British Land Initiative and the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs' Plan of Action for land tenure:

• state of knowledge and syntheses;
  
• operational studies on land tenure issues in valley bottom development and land transactions in Burkina Faso;
  
• identification of farmers' practices regarding the use of writing in land transactions;
  
• comparative research in partnership on delegation of the right to cultivate.

GRET also participates in the INCO-CLAIMS research project (EU funding) coordinated by IIED.