Towards an Efficient Implementation of the Land Lease Policy of Ethiopia: A case-study of Hawassa

Abstract

Hawassa, a city on the shores of Lake Hawassa in the Great Rift Valley in Ethiopia, dates back to a 1960 imperial declaration of the site as a resort settlement. Since then it has witnessed a phenomenal growth and under this condition of rapid urbanization competition for land has increased greatly resulting in high land prices, uncontrollable sprawl and the escalation of informality in the land use pattern. In 1993, the Urban Land Lease Policy was introduced to streamline the administration of land and to bring reasonable control to the market in terms of land prices. However, the policy has failed to achieve its goals.  First, the policy comes without substantial legal backing and no enforcement provisions which have resulted in the proliferation of informal settlements. Second, the institutions mandated to manage land in the city do not have the requisite capacity to implement the policy. These challenges have given rise to avoidable bureaucratic hurdles in land transaction, wrongful misinterpretation of policy provisions, noncompliance, and violation of normal governance principles. The methodology employed here has relied mainly on primary and secondary data from an ongoing doctoral study into land management practices in the city. Additionally, interviews of city administrators and discussions with citizen’s focus groups provided considerable information for this work. The paper finds that effective implementation of the policy requires an enabling environment and consistent effort to enforce legal provisions.

Keywords: Land, Urban land, Land Lease Policy,Efficient Implementatation