Aid, Authority, and Development Politics in Liberia’s Customary Land Governance

Customary land formalisation has emerged as an increasingly prominent development intervention across sub-Saharan Africa, promoted as a means of enhancing tenure security, reducing land disputes, and strengthening community participation. In Liberia, these ambitions have been institutionalised through the 2018 Land Rights Act (LRA), which formally recognises customary land ownership and establishes community-based governance structures for land management. While often framed as a technical or legal reform, customary land formalisation is embedded within broader aid-driven development agendas that prioritise investment, productivity, and market integration. This paper examines how foreign-supported customary land formalisation unfolds in practice in Liberia, and how it reshapes the politics of development by reconfiguring authority, participation, and dispute management within customary land governance. The paper draws on a qualitative interpretive research design combining semi-structured interviews and document analysis. Empirical material was collected through ninety-five interviews conducted across approximately sixteen towns in two counties and three districts engaged in USAID-supported land formalisation initiatives. Interview participants include customary leaders, community members and representatives, NGO workers, and state officials involved in land governance and reform implementation. Documentary sources include national legislation, donor strategies, and project-level documents. The analysis applies thematic coding to examine how land governance, dispute processes, and community participation are structured and negotiated through formalisation, and how the process and aid was perceived and experienced. The findings suggest that customary land formalisation operates as a form of political management rather than a straightforward resolution of land conflict. In the short term, formalisation may reduce the intensity of disputes by channelling conflicts into recognised procedures and newly constituted governance bodies. However, this proceduralisation shifts responsibility for dispute resolution and land management onto communities without providing commensurate authority or durable capacity, rendering local institutions dependent on continued external support. At the same time, customary land formalisation is embedded within, and shaped by, the political economy of foreign aid. Donor priorities, funding cycles, and implementation logics structure how formalisation is carried out, privileging legal legibility, procedural compliance, and future economic use. Within this context, customary land is increasingly framed as a leasable and investable resource, even where alienation is formally restricted. These dynamics tend to advantage actors with greater organisational capacity and familiarity with donor-supported mechanisms, while narrowing the space for informal negotiation and locally embedded practices. In this process, “custom” is not simply recognised or preserved but is actively reconstituted through aid-mediated governance. Taken together, these findings indicate that foreign-supported customary land formalisation in Liberia illuminates broader dynamics in the politics of development. Rather than overcoming the limits of technocratic reform, formalisation reproduces tensions between policy ambition and lived practice, redistributes governance responsibilities without resolving underlying inequalities, and embeds donor influence within everyday state–society relations. By analysing land formalisation as a development intervention rather than a purely legal reform, the paper contributes to comparative debates on how aid reshapes authority, governance, and political responsibility in post-conflict contexts.