Socio-Economic Revival and Emerging Issues Related to Land and Customary Institutions in Yirol, Southern Sudan

Sammendrag

This paper investigates post-war livelihood changes in a predominantly Dinka area in Southern Sudan. It further looks at different administrative and legal structures and explores the future implications of these interactions for livelihood development. The study uses qualitative data from interviews and discussions with herders, farmers, community leaders, officials and aid workers in two local communities in Yirol County for an in-depth analysis. A major focus of the analysis is the land use system and customary institutions in Dinka communities and the relations between them and the emerging structures of the Civil Authority of New Sudan (CANS) in an area controlled by the Sudan People?s Liberation Movement (SPLM) for several years. The study shows that the absence of armed hostilities in Yirol County for a long period provided the people an opportunity to rebuild their livelihoods and the SPLM the space to build some administrative structures. Changes and improvements have taken place in the localities, partly due to successful interventions by INGO?s. However, the revival of livelihoods has been uneven as evidenced by the ongoing socioeconomic differentiation, which has been accompanied by the marginalization of a section of the households in the study localities. The revival of livelihoods has also led to resource conflicts within and between communities. The existence of marginalization and resource conflicts is indicative of wha t might become a wider phenomenon in post-war Southern Sudan. Insecure rights to productive resources are a characteristic of the marginalized. Further, the competition for land resources can be expected to increase dramatically as reconstruction and development begin on a major scale. This would generate new problems regarding rights and access to productive resources. The challenge for the New Sudan is to foresee these problems and find appropriate institutional arrangements and policies to deal with them to enable an equitable post-war development.