Introduction: African land digitalisation outcomes for vulnerable social groups -- actors, complexities and contexts.

Digitalisation, Participation, Contexts and Customary Tenure in Africa

Abstract

This Special Issue examines the relationship between the digitalisation of land administration and customary landowning communities in Africa, drawing on empirical studies from Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Ghana, Kenya, and Mali. Across these contexts, digitalisation has emerged as a central land administration reform, framed as a technical solution to (in)efficiency, (in)security, and conflict through the creation of digitised land registers, automated procedures, and data-driven governance systems. While these reforms promise transparency, efficiency, and improved tenure security, this Special Issue argues that digitalisation is not a neutral or purely technical intervention. Rather, it is embedded within broader neoliberal discourses and political–economic structures that reconfigure land relations, often to the detriment of customary landholders.

The contributions demonstrate that digital land administration frequently marginalises customary tenure systems by privileging statutory, individualised, and market-oriented land relations. In doing so, it facilitates processes of land commodification, financialisation, and external investment, while weakening communal control, sociocultural reproduction, and local livelihoods. Empirical findings highlight how limited participation, gendered exclusions, weak institutional coordination, and external control over land data exacerbate inequalities and constrain communities’ ability to contest dispossession or derive benefits from their lands.

At the same time, the Special Issue avoids romanticising customary tenure, recognising internal inefficiencies and conflicts. Instead, it advances a critical argument that sustainable and equitable digitalisation requires a bottom-up, participatory approach grounded in local sociocultural values and commons-based land relations. The collection concludes that digitalisation must be reimagined as a complementary process that supports social reproduction, capital formation from below, and community-defined development pathways, rather than as a technocratic instrument of land liberalisation and control.