The books by Sandra Joireman and Christian Lund constitute two interesting contributions to the burgeoning literature on property rights in Africa.

Lund's work explores the complex interactions between national political changes and struggles over property and local politics. Its geographical focus is northern Ghana. Its span stretches from the advent of colonial control in 1901 to the 2000s. Unlike the southern areas of Ghana, where the British never succeeded in assuming blanket control over land, all lands in the Northern Territories were formally brought under the control of the colonial state in 1901. The leaders who ruled the country from independence in 1957 continued this policy until 1979. This rule did not always mean the effective control of land by state officials, but it had the consequence of giving chiefs control over land to the detriment of earth priests who previously exercised broad powers over the allocation of land rights. Local Politics and the Dynamics of Property in Africa explores the struggles over land and local politics among rejuvenated earth priests, chiefs, and ordinary land claimants that followed the 1979 constitution, which handed back land in northern Ghana to its “original owners” without specifying these original owners.

Joireman's Where There Is No Government explores the institutional arrangements that enforce property rights in common law African countries in a situation where the state does not adequately perform this task. The author highlights the role of violent entrepreneurs, bureaucratic entrepreneurs (state agents officially uninvolved in land policy matters who deploy their authority to intervene in land matters), and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in the enforcement of property rights in land. She lays out the criteria of predictability, accessibility, equity, effectiveness, and restraint against which she judges these enforcement mechanisms. The work deals with cases from Ghana, Kenya, and Uganda, all reasonably stable states that have undertaken land reform projects aimed, among other things, at making land rights more secure.

A cursory look at much of the political science and economics literature on property rights in Africa indicates that it is heavily weighted toward exploring the causes and consequences of various property rights regimes in African countries. Very little effort has gone into exploring what are those property rights arrangements whose causes and effects we seek to analyze. The biggest contribution of these two books to the literature on property rights in Africa might lie in their thorough effort at laying bare these institutions, processes, and practices.

Each of these books also has its individual strengths that are sometimes in contradistinction to each other. A key strength of Joireman's work is her adoption of a very broad spatial comparative scope, focusing on three countries. This allows her to comment in an informed manner on the pervasiveness, strengths, and weaknesses of various institutional arrangements. Further, she avoids the pitfall, common to many works on Africa, of decrying what does not exist (a consistently strong state) without investigating what does exist (the arrangements that people fashion to make life livable). While Joireman may not be the first to study violent entrepreneurs, NGOs, and bureaucratic entrepreneurs as property rights enforcers, her systematic exploration and assessment of their roles across different locales on the continent has to be recognized as at least partly new. In addition, her explicit elaboration of multiple criteria for assessing enforcement mechanisms allows us to escape blanket and crude judgments on these mechanisms that sometimes obfuscate more than they clarify. Her nuanced approach shows that choices between these institutions always involve trade-offs.

Lund's book lacks the spatial comparative intents and scope of Joireman's. Lund limits himself mostly to northern Ghana, sometimes seeming to spurn glaring opportunities to roam farther afield. But what the book lacks in spatial breadth it makes up for in depth. Thus, while Joireman's work is guilty of a lack of depth in many places (Chapters 5 and 6 seem particularly short on needed depth), Lund's work provides the reader with a deep understanding of the situation of property rights and local politics in the small area of northern Ghana. The book also displays an impressive thematic compass relative to Joireman's and to many other works on property rights by inserting a discussion of property rights and local politics into deep reflections on issues concerning forestry and forest management, as well as dams and water management. It thus ends up offering insights into property and power that students of property, local politics, and institutions in other parts of the world will easily recognize and find useful.

The location of local and national politics in discussions of, and contestation over, property rights is another point on which these books diverge. In Joireman's work, the two questions of the role of land in national and local politics and the impact of local and national politics on contestation over land rights never attract central attention. Given the extent to which land is mentioned in politics, both violent and nonviolent, in African countries, this has to be considered a weakness of the book. By contrast, Lund treats property rights as unequivocally political and deals with the ways in which struggles over property rights are framed by, and in turn frame, local politics. He links this even further to national politics, facilitating the exploration of one of his central themes, namely, the inconstant, renegotiable, and fluid nature of property rights in northern Ghana. Questions of property rights are never settled once and for all. Losers do not always disappear. They bide their time, waiting for propitious moments that are often heralded by changes in national laws, policies, and politics. These struggles occur in and implicate a diversity of arenas, including the cultural, economic, political, and legal. In this sense, Lund's work, more than Joireman's, recalls other recent work on property rights in Africa, such as that of Sara Berry (Chiefs Know Their Boundaries, 2000) that treats land as an inherently political resource that is thoroughly implicated in local and national politics.

The treatment of the government is a point on which these two works seem to diverge but, in fact, fortunately, agree to a very large extent. One is tempted to regard Where There Is No Government as the starting point of both of these works. But Lund does not claim that northern Ghana has ever been a place where there is no government, as Joireman would. Instead of dwelling on the absence of the classic highly developed and intrusive state, he explores the ways in which the government is present in other no less interesting ways, as seen, for example, in the activities of agricultural officers, district workers, members of parliament, and regional ministers. The nonconstant, nonforceful, and not always predictable nature of the state's presence shapes the arena of local politics and acts as a resource that locals draw on in struggles over property. Refreshingly, we can say that this is a line of inquiry that Lund shares with Joireman despite her book title and repeated claims about the absence of government. Her bureaucratic entrepreneurs are state functionaries, despite their straying from their official duties and spheres. Knowledge of protection rackets in weak institutional environments around the world would similarly lead us to suspect that there might be some overlap between the manpower of state security agencies and her violent entrepreneurs. NGOs are sometimes “owned” and led by state agents or those closely related to them. Ignoring the way in which Joireman's title undersells the sophistication of her work, we can say that both books can be situated within a broad literature by William Reno (Warlord Politics and African States, 1998), Jean-Francois Bayart, Stephen Ellis, and Beatrice Hibou (The Criminalization of the State in Africa, 1999), and others who have analyzed the evolution of states and the interaction of state and nonstate structures in African countries.

It will be a disservice to these two books to discuss them only within the context of African political economy or property rights. Both have to be seen as contributions to the literature on the new institutionalism. In both of these works we have microstories about the evolution of institutions, their manipulation and deployment by actors, and the ways in which these institutions in turn influence how actors relate to each other and to land. Local Politics is particularly innovative in this light. Students of historical and sociological institutionalism will find many things that are familiar in Lund's book. By focusing on the issues of contingency, institutional ambiguity, incompleteness, and the guile and innovativeness with which actors exploit them, the book belongs at the cutting edge of historical institutionalism, recalling contributions to recent edited volumes by James Mahoney and Kathleen Thelen (Explaining Institutional Change, 2010) and Wolfgang Streeck and Kathleen Thelen (Beyond Continuity, 2005).

Despite their richness, these books are not what the student of political economy seeking an explanation of varying patterns of property rights institutions should look to for answers. Joireman is explicit in acknowledging that answers to why questions are “less obvious than answers to” how, whose, and what questions in her work (p. 162). This might be an understatement. Lund also seems rather uninterested in developing any sort of clearly detailed explanation of the form taken by property rights and struggles over them in northern Ghana. Whether we can see this as an offense for which these books are guilty is a matter of perspective. They do not set out to answer these questions in the first place. Further, given the lacunae in descriptive analysis of property rights institutions and the forms that struggles over them take in African countries, these two books may justifiably lay claim to making significant contributions to a body of literature that has so far demonstrated little understanding of actual processes and institutions on the African continent, while elaborating highly generalized theories on the effects and causes of these institutions.