Housing Development, Local Land Conflicts and Sustainable Land-use Planning in Peri-urban Ghana

This paper examines the various ways local land conflicts affect sustainable land-use
planning in peri-urban Ghana. In recent years, rapid urbanisation has resulted in a high
demand for customary lands for housing development in peri-urban areas in Ghana.
Customary lands are continuously converted to residential uses, leading to eviction of
indigenes from their farmlands. A mixed method approach was used to collect data
from the research participants in Aburaso, Ghana. Purposive sampling technique was
used to sample 9 key informants while simple random sampling technique was
employed to gather 31 individual household developers. The research findings reveal
that dispossession of indigenes and poor accountability on the part of chiefs create
contestations within royal family, and land conflicts between chiefs and other clans in
communities. The ultimate results are violence, death, poor land allocation and poor
land-use planning with houses lacking portable water, proper sanitation and good
access to roads. The insights from this study challenge the conventional thinking that
strengthening the capacity of customary land administration will support economic
development and poverty alleviation. The study, therefore, recommends that land
allocations should be participatory involving all stakeholders such as chiefs, traditional
council and community members.