Titling and Beyond: Evidence from Dar es Salaam, Tanzania

Alexandra Patricia Panman and Nancy Lozano Gracia
Authors registered in the RePEc Author Service: Nancy Lozano-Gracia

No 9580, Policy Research Working Paper Series from The World Bank

Abstract: Land titling has been a policy priority for developing country cities for decades. In Sub-Saharan Africa and across the world, tenure formalization has been promoted as a tool to improve the quality and value of urban housing. The track record of these projects, however, has generally been disappointing. Why is this? This paper argues that project design has paid too little attention to contextual features of land markets in estimating the benefits of formalization to individual households. The paper draws on evidence from a case study city — Dar es Salaam, Tanzania — to show that in cities where broader property rights institutions are incomplete and informal sources of tenure security are strong, formal property rights may not be valued by households. This raises questions about the households’ willingness to pay for regularization and suggests that complementary strategies to build trust in government and consolidate public benefits of titling will be needed to ensure that projects have a beneficial impact.

Keywords: Municipal Management and Reform; Urban Housing; Urban Housing and Land Settlements; Urban Governance and Management; Regulatory Regimes; Legislation; Legal Reform; Social Policy; Common Property Resource Development; Legal Products; Judicial System Reform; Agricultural Economics; Hydrology; Energy Policies&Economics (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021-03-12
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-agr, nep-law, nep-ppm and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/49372161 ... -Salaam-Tanzania.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Titling and beyond: Evidence from Dar es Salaam, Tanzania (2022)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:wbk:wbrwps:9580

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Policy Research Working Paper Series from The World Bank 1818 H Street, N.W., Washington, DC 20433. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Roula I. Yazigi ().