From Rent Gap to Social Injustices: Exploring Digital Land Governance and Displacement in Urban Ghana

From Rent Gap to Social Injustices: Exploring Digital Land Governance and Displacement in Urban Ghana

One point zero Introduction

In the quest for transparency and efficiency in line with the National Land Policy, the Government of Ghana in collaboration with development partners designed the Ghana Enterprise Land Information System to create a fully integrated digital land management environment. However, its progress had been curtailed by a mirage of challenges hampering the planned full rollout and sustainability leading to partial digitization limited to some few localities. Subsequently, the Lands Commission deployed the Enterprise Land Information System focusing mainly on digital land title registration. Yet again, ELIS even though currently being implemented in Accra alone, faces challenges likely to mar the very reasons for its design - efficiency, accountability and the subsequent likelihood of hampering the scale up to other jurisdictions.

Many scholarly works have sought to theorize the interlinkages between digital land tools and transformative land governance with the propensity of bridging rent gaps. This argument has been augmented in recent research in resource governance substantiating the ease of property owners in participatory land governance. However, such contestations are to some extent biased and highly case sensitive. Many often lose focus of the prevailing peculiar land governance architecture and their propensity of impact particularly in most parts of the Global South. In fact, even though emphasizing the significance of land blockchainization; claims the nature of land tenure system can inhibit the course of digital land governance possibly leading to adverse effects on spatial governance. Consequently, the slow expansion of digital land governance across Ghana is mainly birthed from weak institutional frameworks and policy enforcement anchored on legal pluralism of both statutory and customary laws that often intersect, overlap or conflict. The informal nature of customary law particularly relying on oral agreements and varied jurisdictional customs lead to ambiguities that are difficult to reconcile with formal land records stored within systems like GELIS and ELIS. Hence, the wholesale westernized perspectives of digital land platforms seem not fitting within the context of Ghana and several countries in Africa. Arguably, digital platforms often disregard the social and cultural dimensions of land tenure rooted in customary law mostly based on narratives and not formally documented. Thus, such a sociotechnical transformation is skewed to the technical processes perhaps as a result of oversimplification by technocrats in state land agencies hijacking the reforms. Equally, subsequent research reiterates the compounding effect of political interference, budgetary constraints and leadership instability within the Lands Commission of Ghana as sources of concern. Furthermore, akin to such systems is the overlapping of rights leading to conflicts - where a land is registered formally but has multiple customary claimants - making resolution more complex within digital systems furthering existential complexities in governance frameworks. The cumulative results lead to marginalized communities and individuals alienated or distrustful of the system, thereby fostering the delays, resistance and complications associated with digital land governance in Ghana.

Scholarly discourse has often focused much on the beneficiary impact of digital tools to land governance in Ghana especially the capacity to rectify the plethora of challenges bedeviling the sector. However, empirical studies demonstrate that digital land systems have varied impacts such as the reconstitution of property governance by rendering land legible to new regimes of finance and speculation cumulating to the processes of gentrification and displacement. Even though other schools of thought have argued that digital land governance alone does not automatically lead to gentrification because this needs to be in tandem with other conducive locational factors. Still argued that, as digitization processes solidify formal titles, those without formal documentation - often the vulnerable are deprived of customarily recognized land rights, making it easier for external investors, urban developers or political elites to acquire tracks of land, sometimes leading to displacement of indigenous people and the poor. Moreover, the high costs, complex bureaucratic requirements and limited access to digital infrastructure in impoverished areas further marginalize these groups. The researcher concludes that, bridged rent gaps coupled with the incapacitation of the marginalized necessitated by digital land governance breeds gentrification induced displacement especially in urban Africa.

Interestingly, gentrification has recently been conceptualized in its various forms in urban Ghana. However, such literature does not provide critical linkages to the teething complex land governance regimes that is postulated to facilitate unplanned gentrification and displacement in cities. As a result, other scholars have contested that such studies have lost touch with the dynamics of pluralistic regimes leading to bizarre outcomes of urban development processes such as in Ghana. Equally, emphasis in smart urban studies have concentrated on the technical processes with overstated assumptions of the feasibility of developed digital tools in different jurisdictions to the neglect of peculiar societal dimensions.

Premised on the above, there exists a lacuna of critical data on the nature and intra and interlinkages between digital land systems and gentrification induced displacement inclusive of its attendant repercussions especially embedded in Ghana's peculiar land regime. The prevalence of such biases pertaining to developing countries and the displaced in urban development processes has been bemoaned by geographers such as Helbrecht. This is so pronounced to the extent that, even within studies that seek to close this gap, the data is often scattered across different sources and not providing any critical linkages. This equally makes it difficult to critically evaluate the interactions and impacts of digitized land systems and to proffer practically workable strategies for implementation. While we know that gentrification and displacement are happening within the context of digital land governance, we don't fully understand the dynamic interactions of the processes in urban Ghana. The gap of understanding the critical processes and reasons by which digitalized land systems lead to gentrification and displacement in urban Ghana is partly the bane to developing the rightful strategies in using digital technologies in curbing the repercussions associated with Ghana's land governance. This could partly explain the delays in upscaling the Ghana Enterprise Land Information System and later the Enterprise Land Information System albeit over two decades of implementation - depriving the country of fully benefitting from such reforms.

To this, Owusu Ansah et al reemphasized the need for a thorough assessment of the ELIS in the bid to digitalize the manual processes that prevail and remain insurmountable within Ghana's Lands Commission. Hence, the need for critical analyses of the intrainterlinkages of smart infrastructure in urban development processes within the scope of Ghana's land administration. This study positions itself at this intersection, to investigate the processes of digital land governance and how they serve as engines of contemporary gentrification induced displacement, intensifying processes of accumulation and dispossession while reshaping the terrain of struggle over the rights to urban lands in Ghana.

This study is quite interesting, promising to unearth the peculiar dynamics of the deployment of digital systems in pluralistic legal land governance regimes such as Ghana. Digital land governance platforms have been tested in Western countries within single statutory governance regimes of land without the interreferences associated with pluralistic regimes. Hence, it is intriguing to explore how these dynamics play out in a hybrid governance system with almost all lands under customary land governance and the associated conflicts as a result of the perceived state sponsored and hijacked DLG process in Ghana. It is insightful especially, in the midst of the complexities and hegemonies in Ghana's land governance to explore very critical questions regarding the ELIS and GELIS reforms focused mainly on urban development processes due to the known vibrancy of urban land markets in Ghana. Also, the variance of legal systems leading to institutional conflicts regarding DLG common within Africa provide a fertile ground for this study in the light of contextualizing digital land governance systems. Ghana is the appropriate case test particularly considering the wealth of experiences in digital land governance.

It is equally intriguing to explore how a standardized digital platform could achieve the outcome of unifying various land information across Ghana under fairly different customs across different traditional jurisdictions. For this reason, the researcher chooses two case studies - Tamale and Accra with diverse land customs and the experiences of the application of GELIS and ELIS respectively. Taking a cue from the above, the investigations will be carried out in Tamale, Northern Ghana and Accra, Southern Ghana where both GELIS and ELIS have been implemented respectively. Accra is situated on the Southern coast of Ghana, bordered to the West by the Central region, to the North by Eastern region, to the East by Volta region and to the South by the Gulf of Guinea in West Africa. It is located in the Greater Accra region, one of the sixteen regions of Ghana. Accra is the national and regional capital of Ghana and the Greater Accra region respectively hosting the seat of government and headquartering all state institutions inclusive of the Lands commission separate offices for both the regional and the national levels. Accra is the most populated and urbanized with very fast levels of urbanization and the development of the real estate sector including informal settlements. Hence, Accra turns to be one of the most expensive in terms of housing in Ghana. It is occupied by diverse groups with land customs under the traditions of the Ga Dangme since they are the indigenous owners of the land. Equally, Accra is noted for major land litigations and a host of many unemployed with a multidimensional poverty index of about twelve percent. Tamale is the first region to have been created in the Northern sector of Ghana and it is the capital of the Northern region of Ghana. Tamale is about six hundred kilometers North of Accra.

It is located in the Savannah landscape and noted as the fastest growing city of the country. Tamale is located in between nine degrees sixteen minutes North and nine degrees thirty-four minutes North latitude and zero degrees thirty-four minutes West to zero degrees fifty-seven minutes West longitude. Equally, Tamale hosts the regional Lands Commission supervising the implementation of GELIS, other state land agencies and about four Customary Land Secretariat inclusive of the Dagban Land Secretariat supervising the other Secretariats. It has a fast-developing real estate sector particularly the sale of old buildings for commercial land uses sometimes leading to disputes. It hosts a lot of ethnic groups but the indigenes and the original land owners are the Dagombas who are patrilineal in nature. The land is mostly managed by subdivisional chiefs on behalf of the paramount chief, the Yaa-Naa. Tamale or the Northern region has recorded a lot of land related conflicts mostly land boundary disputes and some clashes between state and customary land agencies. The researcher seeks to investigate the phenomena across such two cities in Ghana through the lens of the following set questions:

One point one. Research questions

One point one point one. Main research question

How does digital land governance transform land access, management and displacement in urban Ghana and why gaps remain in terms of data inclusivity?