Abstract:
The contemporary urbanization, land dispute and the implications to the sustainability of land use
especially in the peri-urban areas are emerging as a cross-cutting theme in policy debates and scientific
discourse. Most cities in developing countries, including Ethiopia, are experiencing a continuous
expansion of peri-urbanization. This high rate of peri-urbanization, and the complexities of constructing
effective land use management and decision support framework lead to increasing land use conflicts, a
consistent high rate of informal settlement patterns, frequent occurrence of land use dynamics, illegal
land acquisition and inequality in land access in most parts of peri-urban areas. These problems call an
effective peri-urban land use management and decision support framework. Hence, the main objective of
this research is to assess the existing land use management and decision support discourses, strategies
and practices with the view to adopt an effective peri-urban land use management and decision support
framework. The research relied on a socio-spatial approach and a concept-centric literature review. Both
socio-economic and spatial data were utilized. The data were analyzed using descriptive statistics, and
the validity and consistency of the data were tested using Cronbach’s alpha coefficient. The synthesis
result indicated that the existing peri-urban land management frameworks consisting of the institutional
arrangements related to land use intervention and the associated land information are incoherent and far
from being integrated. The socio-spatial results also portray that the contribution of the informal land use
intervention is high for the observed high rate of conversion of peri-urban land uses and management
challenges. This is because the existing land intervention processes are lacking effectiveness to govern
the spatial patterns of unregulated land uses. This creates haphazard, disputed, and unregulated land use
systems in the peri-urban areas. The quality of land information also lacks responsiveness to support
land-related decisions such as land use intervention and spatial management of peri-urban areas. This is
because the variations in the governance of land information between urban and rural tiers of land
administration institutions hamper data sharing, and it derives information redundancies and
contradictions, which combined lead to ambiguous information use and reliance. These hamper the
effectiveness of decision-makers and result in a situation where managing peri-urban land use is
ineffective. Taking into account these problems, this research has adopted an effective peri-urban land
use management and decision support framework by identifying the main requirements, indicators and
monitoring system towards the proposed framework