A socio-legal perspective on land market informality and accountability in urban land governance

Informal land markets are treated in terms of the processes and practices of transaction, access and ownership that exist outside of or in opposition to the formal mechanisms entailed by state law and regulation. Notwithstanding wider debates in urban studies on the problematic dichotomy of ‘formal’ and ‘informal’, we suggest the place of law and legality in underwriting such institutions and arrangements around land has been undertheorized. This article complicates how the basic categories of state law and regulation on the one hand and non-state norms, rules, customs and practices on the other are used through an examination of an ostensibly informal land market in Maputo, Mozambique. We introduce and apply the socio-legal concepts of scale, jurisdiction and temporality for offering a more complex picture of (in)formality: that while this land market is prohibited at one scale of state law it is simultaneously enabled at another. We find that the state remains surreptitiously involved in this prohibited market by way of local neighbourhood authorities and their informal practices that, officially, have no role in urban land sales, management and administration. Through this move, in turn, we reveal significant accountability implications and questions around the delivery of equitable governance of urban land and communities. As a contribution to the study of informality in urban land governance, we suggest that actors with jurisdiction in this local scale of state law should become seen as subject to the same normative demands for legal accountability as the official institutions of urban land management and administration, and within better systems for public accountability of all actors in the urban land sector.