Despite improved legal instruments, the management of land, as has been shown, results in tensions. In the Borgou, there are two mechanisms for conflict resolution: negotiated/amicable or contentious/formal.
The former was traditionally the domain of customary actors who played a role in land disputes before they were eventually brought to the justice system. The latter involves appointed government authorities – the justice administration, the conciliation courts, or officers of the Territorial Agency for Agricultural Development (ATDA)[29] – and the security forces. They enforce the law by often imposing compensation to be paid by one actor to the other or by pronouncing penal sanctions.
Interviewed actors overwhelmingly agreed that farmer-herder conflicts are mostly settled through an amicably negotiated mechanism within their communities in the Borgou Department. Negotiations are commonly held with the mediation of an authority that both sides perceive to be legitimate in order to find viable solutions to the conflict. The individual farmer and herder involved in a conflict primarily select the form of resolution and the type of actor they would accept to conduct the mediation process.
Actors involved in the resolution of land conflicts
Semi-structured interviews allowed us to pose similar questions to all participants. One of the questions involved an appreciation of the role of specific actors in conflict resolution and the extent to which actors are presently involved in dispute settlement concerning land. These data were coded (see Annex 1) and, from the resulting data, three insights can be drawn.
As observed above for formal state security forces, also appointed government authorities are not viewed positively. Interviewed farmers, for example, frequently accuse herders of paying bribes to those officials to secure favourable judgments.
This data shows, moreover, that traditional rulers are perceived to have the most positive influence and the strongest legitimacy to seek amicable solutions to farmer-herder conflicts. The actors involved in dispute settlement are traditional rulers and local farmers’ and herders’ associations. However, while traditional rulers are perceived to play a strong positive role in solving farmer-herder conflicts, they tend to be far less involved than other actors.[30] In the interviews, the respondents explained that traditional authorities are more often involved when conflicts have escalated into deadly armed confrontations and require mediation by a high-level and respected authority.
Surprisingly, as a third observation, a group that is viewed fairly positively and is also strongly involved in dispute settlement is the village-level elected government authorities (village or neighbourhood chiefs).
Village chiefs (also called neighbourhood chiefs in urban areas) are the heads of the village or the neighbourhood council. They were created in January 1999 under the Kerekou regime, in the wake of Benin’s decentralization effort to make the village/neighbourhood level a political and administrative lowest layer of authority.[31] The law (97-028 and 97-029), however, left unclarity with regard to their attribution, functioning, remuneration schemes as well as various practical issues. As a result, these village chiefs created an unofficial political economy to sustain themselves (e.g. not reporting the administrative fees that they collected).[32]
In 2013, the former President Boni Yayi passed a new law aiming to bring more clarity to the selection, organization, attribution, functioning and renumeration of village chiefs.[33] While this had an effect on most administrative layers (communes and arrondissements), the law remained unclear for village chiefs as it simply stated: “the village or city neighbourhood is the basic administrative unit within which rural or urban life is organized.”[34] In practice, however, it allowed room for existing traditional authorities to exert influence; many village chiefs in this period held these positions with the support of traditional authority families and were (s)elected with customary support. This made these functions truly ‘hybrid’ by combining a formal status (the lowest-level decentralized administrative authority heading the conciliation courts) with an informal customary role.
On 20th December 2021, the sitting President Patrice Talon enacted Law 2021-14 on territorial administration which gave practical details on the attribution and functioning of the village and neighbourhood chiefs. Unlike previously, the present law prescribes monthly remunerations to be paid to the village and neighbourhood chiefs and places them under the direct administrative supervision of the chiefs of the arrondissements (note that these are not customary authorities but have also been newly ‘created’) and the administrative secretary of the arrondissements overseeing the communes’ decisions at the village and neighbourhood level.[35] The role of the customary authorities has not drastically changed because the law has only been in effect for a year and the customary influence over village chief elections still remains.
Interviewees suggest that mediation by these village and neighbourhood chiefs most often occurs when land conflicts have not yet escalated and this most frequently results in compensation being agreed by both sides. Interestingly, this compensation is generally not perceived as being unfair. As shown in Figure 4, elected government authorities appear to be generally perceived in a fairly positive way.
Qualitative interviews underscore this point: they highlight how village chiefs benefit from a personal aura within their communities because of their combined social position as community leaders and elected officials.[36] It is that status that gives them a solid position to negotiate conflict settlements informally that is both relevant, locally attuned and accepted in both the administrative and traditional systems.
Interestingly, even the most traditional leaders interviewed for this research acknowledged that the village chiefs are best positioned to conduct conflict resolution negotiations between farmers and herders. In that sense, the changes in local governance offset some of the negative effects of the amendments in the land laws and, despite the obvious political role of these authorities, offer a promising avenue to engage in informal land dispute settlement.