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.