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Introduction: valuing land in Eastern Africa

In the neighbouring regions of northern Uganda and South Sudan, where the editors have undertaken research in recent years, we were often told by interviewees that people now knew or had ‘realized’ the ‘value’ of land. Reflecting on an apparent or anticipated increase in the monetary price of access to land, people cast this in terms of a dawning knowledge – a new awareness of land’s value. Such statements would seem to correspond to broader trajectories – albeit with regional temporal variation – of commodification, rising land values and competition for land, which are frequently asserted or predicted in both academic and policy literature on Africa (e.g. Berry 2002, 638; Cotula 2007; Jayne, Chamberlin, and Headey 2014; Peters 2013, 547– 548). Indeed, it is hard to controvert the ubiquity and inexorability of these processes when their effects are so widely documented and are a focus of popular concern, even in areas where land markets have only recently or partially emerged. Yet it was also evident in Leonardi’s research in 2014 in the Uganda-South Sudan borderlands that there was a much more complicated picture behind these assertions of the sudden awareness of land’s value (Leonardi and Santschi 2016). Land here had not been transformed into a commodity that could be bought and sold and resold without restriction in a ‘world of generalized, universalizable standard value’ (van Binsbergen 2005). Even in the expanding urban areas, where plots of land were being surveyed with varying degrees of technical and legal capacity, the issuing of leasehold titles was subject to considerable locally defined regulation, hybrid governance and elite influence. In the rural areas, people accessed land and asserted land rights through clan-based definitions of landholding communities, in complement or tension with family-based inheritance and with claims to rights based on long-term occupancy and use. More exclusionary definitions of land rights were being asserted in order to inhibit, as much as or more than to enable the sale of land. In many ways then, people were talking about the realization of land’s value in the sense of a change in perception and knowledge rather than necessarily in terms of the capacity to realize that value in a monetary sense. This range of possible dimensions to realizing the value of land is crucial for understanding the multiple possibilities of valuation itself, from the cognitive, conceptual and imaginative, to the presentational, performative and discursive, and to the material, monetary and commercial. The aim of this collection is to highlight and explore the multiple ways in which land may be valued and how this value is realized. In doing so, it seeks to engage with the multivalence of ‘value’ itself. As David Graeber and others have argued, it is not a coincidence