“Rural Land Plans” in Benin (1992–2015): The journey of a “pilot” instrument within non-stabilized policies

Invented in Côte d’Ivoire in the mid-1980s, the Rural Land Plan (Plan foncier rural; PFR) is one of the instruments developed in the framework of international aid to enable the formalization of customary, individual, and collective land rights. It was imported into Benin in the early 1990s with a view to contributing to future land reform. In twenty-five years, the PFR has played a series of different roles: it was an instrument for promoting reform; then the central instrument of a policy for formalizing customary, individual, or collective rights; and finally a tool used in the service of a privatization policy, before recently being marginalized in favor of the cadastre. Through this case, we propose to analyze the problematic links between public policies and instruments, showing the relative autonomy of the PFR in relation to successive policies, its composite and adaptive dimension, and the way in which debates about it reveal tensions around the policy itself. While instruments are supposed to be a means of implementing a policy, here the instrument preceded the policy, and it endures by adapting to its reformulations, in a kind of transplantation that remains uncertain.