Dynamics of land access in Ghana’s real estate sector

Ghana’s land governance is characterized by legal pluralism, which is saddled with weak institutional capacities, complex procedures, and high transaction costs that often curtail peoples’ desires and possibilities to build and own houses. To address these challenges, real estate developers are marketing gated and pseudo-gated communities as a solution by promising homebuyers titled and litigation-free land. Based on data from semi-structured interviews, this paper examines how real estate developers navigate Ghana’s multiple institutional regulations to acquire and register land for development. The analysis focuses on how developers activate and combine various resources in the form of economic, social, cultural, and symbolic capital to secure litigation-free land. While financial capital and formal procedures are prerequisites in this process, a successful outcome depends on a high degree of cultural competence and social networking with influential and relevant entrepreneurs and actors in multiple institutions. Therefore, we argue that access to land and subsequent title registration depends on developers’ ability, in a context-specific legitimate manner, to combine resources and negotiate with actors within both customary and statutory regulatory institutions.