Alain Durand-Lasserve was Senior Research Fellow with the Centre National de le Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), France. He is currently attached to the Laboratory Les Afriques dans le Monde (LAM), a joint research center between the University of Bordeaux, the CNRS and the National Foundation for Political Sciences, France. He is currently a member of the Technical Committee Land and Development (French Development Agency and Ministry of Foreign Affairs). Over the last two decades, he has been involved in research and consultancy on land and tenure issues in Sub-Saharan African countries with bilateral cooperation agencies and with multilateral development agencies. He has published extensively on tenure formalization and urban land and housing policies.