Chapter 2 provides an overview of the contemporary context of customary authority and control over land rights in Africa, while situating Zambia and Senegal within broader regional trends. It shows that institutional pluralism in land rights at the local level is widespread and provides necessary background on a key mechanism driving incremental shifts in the control over land: piecemeal land titling. The chapter traces the titling process in Zambia and Senegal, including how customary authorities use unofficial and official channels to exert agency. In addition, Chapter 2 introduces two alternative explanations for the uneven expansion of state control over land. It explains why we need new frameworks that examine the agency of citizens and customary authorities, and the ways in which institutions shape their responses to titling.

This chapter analyses the construction of relations between ‘bodies of norms’ in contexts of global financial governance from the perspective of ‘entanglement’. It examines how entanglements were discursively construed from the 1990s until the period of post-global financial crisis reforms. In the aftermath of the Asian financial crisis, officials at the Bank for International Settlements, International Monetary Fund and United Nations disagreed on how to order relations between multiple norms and institutions deemed to be relevant for global financial stability. Different ordering projects struggled to manage institutional pluralism in global finance. The move to ‘international standards’ authorized actors to shape and order relations between a growing multiplicity of bodies of norms. The construction of the ‘Compendium of Standards’ sought to order relations between a growing number of international financial standards. Other proposals sought to create a more permanent institutional framework, including via legalization. As the challenge of governing multiplicity in contemporary global financial governance persists, none of the different ordering projects has imposed itself as a common frame of reference.