Gérer la ville au Bénin : la mise en œuvre du Registre foncier urbain à Cotonou, Porto-Novo et Bohicon
The management of West African cities is problematic nowadays: uncontrolled urban sprawl, insufficient basic services, and land insecurity. Yet, major reforms had been put in place with the assistance of international aid to enhance the effectiveness of urban management; which seems to have failed. Going beyond this policy failure statement, the present dissertation aims at understanding how “managing the city” takes place in the particular context of West Africa. The implementation of the Urban Land Registry (RFU), a municipal and multi-purpose land information system that has been put in place in Benin through development programmes in the early 1990s, is the lens through which urban management is examined. Urban management is then studied through the actions taken rather than through the discourses. With a socio-anthropological approach, the implementation of the instrument is analysed from the stakeholders’ perspectives and according to a double analysis grid. On the one hand, the analysis aims at understanding the local appropriation of the RFU inside public administrations; and on the other hand, its aims at comprehending the interaction of the RFU with the territory, in particular with the complex dynamics of access to the land and land security. A multiple case study was conducted in three municipalities: Cotonou, Porto-Novo, and Bohicon. This study led to two main conclusions. First, the RFU is recognized as the key instrument of local taxation, but it is minimally implemented. This particular functioning is an optimal adaptation to a context made of: 1) professional rivalries in a compartmentalized administration, 2) political and financial stakes related to different sources of local revenues, and 3) political and institutional tensions provoked by the late decentralisation. Then, the RFU’s impacts in terms of national professional capacities are insufficient to reform urban management from inside municipal administration. Second, a key function of the RFU that is centralizing information on presumed landowners is impeded by the commodification of land information and by the territorialisation of land regulatory modes. This affects the implementation of the RFU as it takes part in this land information market, but with little success; and its impact is differentiated according to the ‘land regulation territory’ it applies. Finally, ‘managing the city’ in Benin is not an automatic task, even with the introduction of management instruments such as the RFU. Administration and politics continue to shape municipal policies, and the pluralistic city is managed in a differentiated manner. To the designers of public action (policies), this dissertation encourages to take into account existing regulation modes in African societies, even if they are multiple and complex, and it recognises the singular process of institution building in Africa.
Urban management Land information system Local taxation Public administration Land market Land security Urban planning Public action (policy) analysis West Africa Benin