The Evolution of of Property Rights to Land in Post Colonial Buganda

Abstract

Introduction It is a nearly established fact in the literature on economic growth and development that institutions, particularly well defined and enforced property rights, are vital for economic growth. Thus, it may well be said that it is now widely accepted that economic development requires the creation of sound political, economic, and legal institutions, in particular secure and functional property rights. Accordingly, it is important for any country seeking economic advancement to know the right institutions to establish and understand how to secure them. Yet, although the importance of institutions is widely recognized, there seems to be an absence of consensus on what institutions actually matter for economic growth and how to acquire them. Indeed, mere acknowledgment that “institutions matter” is not very meaningful “unless we have a common understanding about what institutions are and how they are formed” ( Aoki 2001 , 4). Admittedly, there are still gaps in our knowledge on how institutions emerge and change. There are wide- ranging controversies regarding the definition of institutions, how to identify the right institutions, and how to obtain them. Further, there exists much uncertainty regarding the interaction between formal and informal institutions in engendering the de facto institutional environment. Existing research and practice do not shed much light on the immense challenge of transforming bad institutions into good ones ( Tsebelis, 1995 ). In this chapter, we investigate the evolution of property rights to land in Buganda during the postcolonial period (1962 to date) in order to understand why property rights emerge and change, in order to contribute to the discourse on the emergence and change in the institution of property and aid our understanding on how desirable institutions may be acquired. Using an institutional analytical framework based on the field of New Institutional Economics, we examine the changes in property rights to land in Buganda, a region in the central part of Uganda, an East African nation. We conclude that, first, property rights do not necessarily change in response to changes in relative prices. Neither does change in property rights always happen when we expect it to. Other factors, such as vested interests of political actors and interest groups within a society conceptualized as veto players, can interfere and delay change or stop it altogether. Relative price changes only lead to institutional change when the price change coincides with the interests of the state and powerful groups in society. Second, we underscore the importance of distinguishing between formal and informal institutions when trying to understand and explain institutional change, because each category emerges and changes for different reasons. While it is the deliberate decisions of political actors hat may change formal property rights, informal property rights are more likely to be the consequence of the designer’s cognitive limits and unintended consequences. In this chapter, we draw attention to reactive informal institutions, a category that is often overlooked in analyses of institutional change. Reactive informal institutions emerge in response to overly constraining formal laws; they have no relationship to culture and can change relatively quickly.