Local level legal practices concerning land in Burkina Faso neither represent the formal legal rules and institutions as prescribed by the law, nor totally disregard state institutions and legislation. Rather, a creatively crafted amalgam of rules and practices emerges as a negotiated result mediated through power relations. It is argued that despite ambiguous and negotiable legislation and despite inconsequential and challenged institutions, the state has a profound, though oblique, effect on the social management of property. The state or rather the way the state is imagined is central to the production of property.
