Playing with a Diversity of Land Regulation Sources: Sahelian Pluralism

In Sahelian Africa, the land tenure situation is currently defined by the overlapping of several land regulation (rules and institutions) systems, from informal customary land rights (which local people recognize and respect) to legal land policy rules that place the major part of the territory under State responsibility. Land actors build their land use practices not on a unique regulation reference followed by all, but on a portfolio of land regulation sources, specific to each land actor according to his/her own perception, which they draw on according to the context. The article is based on the experimentation of a role-playing game aiming to test the reality and the conditions of actors’ logics of mobilization with regard to this pluralism of land regulation. It presents the first avenues of reflection for understanding the context in which new rural land use policies will be received and taken into account by land actors in Sahelian countries, of which Senegal, where the present research was carried out.