Urban land acquisition and social justice in Ethiopia

Abstract

As urban land could be used for manifold purposes, urban residents look for such land enthusiastically to serve their enormously diverse interests. Thus, urban land use laws and policies should be flexible, apt and transparent to respond to such various and complex land demands. An inflexible form of land transfer and management system may drive some section of the society out of the land deal and an extremely flexible urban land permission and use system could result in a pervasive corruption and that in turn could lead to bad governance. In this work, the author argues that the existing urban land acquisition system of Ethiopia has resulted in social injustice by denying the poor from access to urban land; and creating discriminatory environment while enforcing the new lease system.

Keywords: access to land, land lease, social justice, tenure security, urban land policy