Report: access to land at the northern periphery of Niokolo-Koba National Park, Senegal

Based on research conducted in Senegal in 2004, this field report focuses on the politics of access to land at the northern periphery of the Niokolo-Koba National Park, where a group of villages evicted from the national park were resettled in the 1970s. Conflicts over the allocation of land resurfaced in the 1980s, following the application of laws authorizing rural community councils to allocate use rights in village agricultural lands. The land claims of evicted villages were challenged by the rural council and local state authorities, who sought to define such claims as illegal or ambiguous based on exclusionary discourses of productive use of land, autochthony and citizenship. The politics of access to land at the northern periphery are shaped by land and administrative reforms undertaken since the end of colonial rule in Senegal and the on-going local transformation of authority and property relations under increasing commoditization and insecurity of land use rights.