Socioeconomic Change and Land Use in Africa

This study investigates how and why group ranch members in Kajiado District, Kenya, supported the subdivision of their collective landholdings into individual, titled units, and what outcomes resulted from this transition to individual rights. Viewed over a longer time scale, the author finds that politics is at the core of institutional change: land-owners increasingly seek exclusive rights in an effort to defend their land claims against threats of appropriation by the state, by Maasai elite, and by non-Maasai.