This article employs a political settlements approach to explore the formal and informal institutional dynamics that underpin contemporary rentier capitalism in urban Africa through the case of Antananarivo, Madagascar. It examines how Malagasy ruling elites created opportunities for land-based rent seeking by establishing new institutional arrangements. Specifically, it traces the rise and decline during the 2010s of detailed urban planning, a planning instrument elaborated through public–private partnerships between the Malagasy state and large-scale corporate landowners in Antananarivo. The article argues that public–private partnerships in detailed urban planning served as a strategy for ruling elites to give an appearance of legality to the informal practices that drive land-use changes and real estate construction in the city. This strategy effectively facilitated land investments and created rent opportunities while allowing ruling elites to act with reference to the law, which was crucial to their political survival given the risks of an overt violation of formal rules under Madagascar's competitive and unstable authoritarianism. Yet detailed urban plans were sidelined when they no longer aligned with presidential priorities. By bridging debates on rentier capitalism and political settlements in urban geography, the article offers a lens for analysing the fine-grained institutional dynamics through which rentier logics play out across contexts.
Fanny Voélin (2025) studied this question.