National Land Coalitions and the Preservation of Communities’ Ancestral Land Heritage in Africa

National Land Coalitions (NLCs) work towards the recognition, defence, protection and redistribution of land rights at national level. They build upon frameworks on land tenure developed and agreed by different regional and intergovernmental institutions. Platforms are at the heart of protecting and preserving community and customary lands which constitute the major category of landholding in Africa. The purpose of this paper is threefold: share the successes of National Land Coalitions in selected countries in securing the land heritage for communities and other vulnerable groups; identify the ingredients for such successes including enabling factors and methods used; identify the bottlenecks and threats faced by the actors involved in these coalitions; as well as possible opportunities and recommendations to better capacitate these platforms in achieving their mandate. The analytical framework is based on three components of the syntax namely the Attribute, aIm, and Condition (AIC). The Attribute focuses on the organizational description, the aIm puts emphasis on the coalition’s goal, while the Condition highlights the means coalitions put at the service of their ambition. We undertook a literature review and three case studies serve as basis to analyse the contribution of National Land Coalitions to community land preservation. These include in Cameroon the Banen community in the Ebo Forest, and the land concessions in the Ntem Valley, and in Sierra Leone the palm oil investment by Socfin in the Malen Chiefdom. It is demonstrated that NLC actions and activities have contributed to increasing the preservation of community lands. These Coalitions emerge in a context of arable land scrambling, the adoption and implementation of new progressive land policies and laws that promote and protect community and customary land rights. Through intense policy dialogue, advocacy, and capacity strengthening, facilitated and supported by NLCs, more and more communities are in position to fight land dispossession by states and private actors. However, these Coalitions face challenges that hamper their action, including organizational structure, power asymmetries, financing and sustainability issues. In terms of opportunities, an increasing number of national legislative frameworks are being reviewed and land governance monitoring instruments like the LandMatrix and the LANDex are taken to scale. Spaces such as LandCollaborative put national platforms at the centre of people-centered land governance and facilitate horizontal learning between platform practitioners across countries in Africa.