Biblio

Hawassa, a city on the shores of Lake Hawassa in the Great Rift Valley in Ethiopia, dates back to a 1960
imperial declaration of the site as a resort settlement. Since then it has witnessed a phenomenal growth and under
this condition of rapid urbanization competition for land has increased greatly resulting in high land prices,
uncontrollable sprawl and the escalation of informality in the land use pattern. In 1993, the Urban Land Lease
Policy was introduced to streamline the administration of land and to bring reasonable control to the market in
terms of land prices. However, the policy has failed to achieve its goals. First, the policy comes without
substantial legal backing and no enforcement provisions which have resulted in the proliferation of informal
settlements. Second, the institutions mandated to manage land in the city do not have the requisite capacity to
implement the policy. These challenges have given rise to avoidable bureaucratic hurdles in land transaction,
wrongful misinterpretation of policy provisions, noncompliance, and violation of normal governance principles.
The methodology employed here has relied mainly on primary and secondary data from an ongoing doctoral
study into land management practices in the city. Additionally, interviews of city administrators and discussions
with citizen’s focus groups provided considerable information for this work. The paper finds that effective
implementation of the policy requires an enabling environment and consistent effort to enforce legal provisions.
Keywords: Land, Urban land, Land Lease Policy,Efficient Implementatation