Tenure rights and access to forestsLand-grabbing could be driven by interests ranging from agriculture to minerals, carbon rights, biofuels or conservation, requiring attention to

Anne M. Larson Anne M

. Larson

Tenure rights and access to forests A training manual for research

Part I. A guide to key issues

Tenure rights and access to forests: A training m

anual for research

Anne M. Larson

Tenure rights and access to forests A training manual for research

Part I. A guide to key issues

© 2012 Center for International Forestry Research

ISBN: 978-602-8693-84-4

Larson, A.M. 2012 Tenure rights and access to forests: A training manual for research. CIFOR, Bogor, Indonesia.

Ilustration by Komaruddin

CIFORJl. CIFOR, Situ GedeBogor Barat 16115Indonesia

T +62 (251) 8622-622F +62 (251) 8622-100E [email protected]

cifor.org

Any views expressed in this publication are those of the authors. They do not necessarily represent the views of CIFOR, the authors’ institutions or the financial sponsors of this publication.

Table of contents

Acknowledgments 4

1. Introduction 5Guide to this manual 6

2. What is tenure, why it matters and some caveats 8

3. The content of rights 12

4. Tenure security 16

5. Theoretical and policy approaches to property 21

6. The nature of tenure rights 27Types of tenure rights (de jure) 28Customary and informal (or non-formal) rights (de facto) 30

7. Other important actors and variables 40The role of the state 40Competing interests in forests and forestland 43The role of collective action 45Inside communities: Issues of power and differentiation 48Alternative – or complementary – approaches 52

8. References 55

Acknowledgments

I thank the participants of the tenure session at CIFOR’s 2011 Annual Meeting for very helpful input. I also thank reviewers Esther Mwangi, Manuel Ruiz Perez, Carol Colfer, Abwoli Banana and Manuel Bossier for their very useful comments, most of which have been addressed in this version. I hope that people who use this document will continue to send comments so that it can be regularly updated, to be as useful as possible for ongoing research on forests.

1. Introduction

This guide has been created with the purpose of summarising the most important aspects of forest tenure rights and resource access, because of the relevance of these issues to research on forests, as well as providing guidance on the selection of methods and tools for obtaining appropriate tenure information in research. It is hoped that the guide will help researchers to incorporate tenure dimensions more effectively, with a common understanding and in ways that are comparable across research sites and projects, into a broad spectrum of research projects where tenure issues may influence results.

Although forest tenure has been an issue of concern for researchers and practitioners for some 30–40 years, there are several reasons that CIFOR is taking the initiative now to more fully incorporate tenure into its research agenda. First, tenure rights to forests are changing, with an apparent trend towards recognising the rights of people living in forests, as well as towards privatisation of forests (Sunderlin et al. 2008).

6 Anne M. Larson

These changes are of particular relevance to CIFOR’s strategic goals of improving the livelihoods and wellbeing of people living in and near forests and improving management and conservation of forests in developing countries.

Second, there has been little systematic and broad-based study of tenure issues in forests among the CGIAR institutions. Inclusion of tenure in research more generally at CIFOR, and under the new CGIAR Research Program on Forests, Trees and Agroforestry, would provide an important database of knowledge during this particularly interesting and possibly volatile time in history for the world’s remaining forests.

Third, with increased attention to and interest in forests globally, particularly due to climate change and the growing demand for agricultural land, there is concern over ‘the last great land-grab’. Land-grabbing could be driven by interests ranging from agriculture to minerals, carbon rights, biofuels or conservation, requiring attention to tenure and the potential for the usurpation of forests and forest rights.

Guide to this manualThe manual is aimed at supporting researchers at all levels of expertise, but it is particularly concerned with providing a straightforward introduction to a broad set of issues relating to forest tenure for those with less experience. For researchers more versed in tenure issues, it is hoped that the guide will help to clarify concepts or debates and suggest methods for specific types of research questions.The guide is divided into two parts.

Part I is a guide to key issues in tenure and access based on selected literature. It is not intended to be a comprehensive literature review but rather uses a limited selection of research to highlight central concepts and concerns. Each subsection includes a short recommended reading list. The aims of the first part of the guide are: • to provide key underlying concepts and essential information for those who are

less familiar with the background and theory associated with tenure; and • to outline and explain key findings and emerging issues in forest tenure

rights research.

Part II is a collection of methods and tools that have been used in previous research, primarily but not only from CIFOR, with a discussion of the potential and limitations of each. The aims of the second part of the guide are: • to suggest key arenas of inquiry relevant to research on forests; and • to provide suggestions for appropriate methods and tools to address those

questions in ways that help simplify a highly complex issue.

Tenure rights and access to forests: A training manual for research 7

Part II also includes links to a large set of specific tools and methods for studying tenure. Both sections of this manual should be seen as living documents; online versions will be updated periodically in response to comments and inputs as they are used over time.

The rest of Part I is organised as follows. The second section briefly introduces tenure, explaining why it matters in forestry research and offering some caveats relating to the temptation to make generalisations about tenure rights. The third and fourth sections present central concepts and issues regarding the content of rights (organised around the ‘bundle of rights’) and tenure security, respectively. The fifth section briefly summarises the various schools of thought or tendencies among property scholars. The sixth takes a more in-depth look at a number of issues regarding the nature of tenure rights, particularly issues regarding de jure tenure categories, customary rights, legal pluralism and the formalisation of rights. The final section summarises a series of other important topics that arise in research associated with tenure and forests.

2. What is tenure, why it matters and some caveats

Tenure rights with regard to natural resources refer to the social relations and institutions governing access to and use of land and resources (von Benda Beckman et al. 2006). Forest tenure, then, is concerned with who owns forestland, and who uses, manages and makes decisions about forest resources. Forest tenure determines who is allowed to use which resources, in what way, for how long and under what conditions, as well as who is entitled to transfer rights to others and how. Different rights may be shared or divided in a number of ways and among stakeholders, as are obligations and responsibilities associated with rights. In addition, not only land and forests but trees themselves may be subject to multiple tenure rights (Fortmann 1985, Fortmann and Bruce 1988). Climate change mitigation programmes such as REDD+ have brought attention to carbon as a ‘new’ resource now also subject to allocation, and which may or may not be tied to existing forest and land rights (Savaresi and Morgera 2009).


Tenure refers to the content or substance of rights and to the security of rights. It refers to rights from different points of view, to overlapping rights (when two or more people have claims to the same resource1) and sometimes to conflict. Understanding rights requires an understanding of history and of power relations. In addition, a focus on ‘rights’ alone only tells part of the story: not all rights are exercised and not all of those who gain access to resources have rights. Tenure and access are extremely complex issues, and one of the greatest challenges for research is determining ways to simplify that complexity to facilitate data gathering and analysis but without moving too far from complex reality for the analysis to be valid.

The relevance of tenure to forests and livelihoods is quite apparent. Although there are no simple correlations between the substance or security of tenure rights and outcomes, tenure institutions clearly matter. For example: • Greater local participation in resource governance institutions, such as local

rule-making autonomy, has been shown to lead to better outcomes for biodiversity and livelihoods (Ostrom and Nagendra 2006).

• Insecure tenure has been associated with deforestation and forest degradation (Chomitz et al. 2007).

• Secure access can improve food security for poor communities and particularly the poorest members of those communities (Place 2009).

• Tenure is key to compensation schemes and benefit distribution. • Carbon markets create a new commodity and a new arena for contestation. • Concessions overlaying customary forests and other forms of resource

competition may lead to vulnerability and deforestation. • The poorest people in communities, as well as women, are often disadvantaged

by tenure arrangements.

As mentioned above, the global context for tropical forests is being shaped by two distinct processes: one involving tenure reforms that are often recognising or transferring some tenure rights to communities living in and near forests, the other involving new pressures on forestland for agriculture, biofuels, carbon sequestration and conservation. In this context, the issue of rights for forest-based communities may raise tensions between research and advocacy.

Research on rights is particularly amenable to participatory methods and action research; in fact, understanding local perspectives on tenure rights may be very difficult without this. Nevertheless, local communities may expect researchers to play more of an advocacy role for local tenure rights. At the same time, of course, there

1 There are various ways in which overlaps occur, with and without conflict. See the section on customary rights below for an explanation.

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is a need for all kinds of research and it is not appropriate for all research on tenure to include advocacy. Fundamentally, this requires clarity, as in any research project, regarding priorities and approaches.

Whichever research method is chosen, the following four propositions should be kept in mind.1. More substantial rights and/or tenure security, which may be good for forest-

based people, is not necessarily good for forests. Not all people with secure rights to forests will choose to conserve them,2 as landholders may clear forests for more profitable alternatives (Angelsen 2007).

2. Recognising or formalising tenure rights is not necessarily good for forest-based people. Forest communities may have more rights, access and security through customary or non-formal systems, and formalisation may bring greater state interference and control over local decisions, as well as responsibilities and requirements that did not exist before. Informal systems tend to be more flexible and complex; formalisation may change borders and is likely to fix them.

2 At the same time, it is an interesting issue to consider how and why more restrictions and obligations to conserve forests are sometimes placed on community forest landholders or owners than on other private forest owners or the state.


3. Although the formalisation of rights and/or improved tenure security may be good for some forest-based people, they are not necessarily good for all forest-based people. That is, formalisation may undermine customary systems of multiple and overlapping rights, and rights or security may be granted only to a subset of forest users, thus excluding or increasing insecurity for others who also depend on forests for their livelihoods. Rights may also be captured by local authorities or elites during formalisation processes, or certain rights may be retained by the state.

4. No one tenure regime (public or private, individual or collective) consistently leads to superior outcomes in livelihoods or forest sustainability and conservation in all settings.

These and other issues are discussed further below.

3. The content of rights

With regard to forests, and particularly collective forests and resources, the term tenure rights refers to a bundle of rights ranging from access and use rights to management, exclusion and alienation (see Schlager and Ostrom 1992). Access refers simply to the right to enter the area. Use, or withdrawal, rights refers to the right to obtain resources, such as timber, firewood or other forest products, and remove them from the forest; this includes grazing rights. Use rights can also include the right to earn income from a resource, even if one does not use the resource directly (Mwangi and Meinzen-Dick 2009). This refers to cases in which the government distributes stumpage fees or taxes on concessions to local communities or authorities and different levels of government. Access and use rights do not involve any decision-making power and are therefore weaker rights than the following three.

Management refers to ‘the right to regulate internal use patterns or transform the resource’ (Agrawal and Ostrom 2001: 489). Management is understood as a


collection of decisions, practices and concepts that involve decision-making beyond the immediate resource use, hence planning for future use. Forest management does not assume a particular product or service. Although in the technical terminology of state forest administrations a ‘forest management plan’ usually refers to timber management (logging), management in practice may be for protection (including the protection or maintenance of sacred places), reforestation, non-timber forest products (including payments for environmental services, tourism, carbon), timber or for a variety of products and services at the same time; management may involve household subsistence or commercial use. Converting forest to other uses is also a management decision.

Agrawal and Ostrom (2008) break down management specifically into three aspects of decision-making power: (1) to decide how resources should be protected and used (rule-making); (2) to decide how compliance should be monitored and enforced; and (3) to adjudicate disputes. Tchikangwa et al. (2001) include (1) defining/protecting boundaries; (2) developing/applying rules and regulations; (3) monitoring compliance; (4) resolving conflicts; (5) providing leadership; and (6) assessing fines/ sanctions.

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Although the bundle of rights is often divided among a variety of stakeholders, management rights are probably the most complex because management involves so many different aspects; hence these rights (and responsibilities) are likely to be divided or shared among a variety of actors and institutions (Tchikangwa et al. 2001, Cronkleton et al. 2010). How these are shared may vary based on the value of the resource. For example, timber is likely to require greater state control than non-timber forest products; commercial uses are likely to have greater state control than domestic uses. (Similarly, rights of access and exclusion may also vary based on the value of the resource.)

Exclusion rights refer to the right to decide who can use the resource and who is prevented from doing so. Exclusion rights are often important for conservation, as well as for access to benefits such as payments for environmental services (Wunder 2009), as they refer to the ability to control the entry of outsiders who could degrade resources. At the same time, exclusion can be discriminatory and impinge on the rights of some customary users. Granting this right to one group can result in de facto or de jure privatisation to a particular person or group of people (see Colfer 2005, Mwangi 2007, Ojha et al. 2008). This right may also be shared, such that a community is responsible for excluding outsiders but the state is still permitted to authorise certain resource users. This is the case of chicle gum extractors in Guatemala’s Petén, for example: a national law permits the state to grant individual extraction permits inside areas granted in concession to communities, while the communities are responsible for monitoring the forest and preventing all other incursions (Monterroso and Barry 2009).

Alienation rights are understood as the sale, transfer or lease of the land, which includes the transfer of all of these other rights as well (it does not refer to the sale of forest products). Individuals with land titles are more likely to have formal alienation rights.3 Communities on state land (such as adat communities with customary rights on state land in Indonesia) and even communities with titles (indigenous communities in Latin America, for example) often do not have alienation rights to the land. Communities often have the right to transfer lands within the community but this is not usually considered a formal alienation right. In areas remote from government control, people may have strong customary alienation rights. With or without de jure rights, of course, individuals or community representatives may sell their land or portions of it.

3 Not always, however. Agrarian reform programmes sometimes have given out titles that were not permitted to be sold, such as under the Sandinista government in Nicaragua in the 1980s.


A study by the Rights and Resources Institute (RRI) (Almeida and Hatcher 2011) – examining 32 tenure regimes in 15 countries involving devolution of rights to communities – divides formal alienation rights into three categories: the right to lease the land, to use it as collateral and to sell it. In a few countries, communities have the right to lease land only; in a few others, they have the right to lease and use the land as collateral; and only in three do they have the right to sell it. In 23 cases, they do not have any alienation rights. The RRI study also demonstrates that only in two cases do communities have the entire bundle of rights. (Many advocates of communal or collective lands argue that the ability to sell or mortgage the land places it at risk.)

Recommended reading

1 Agrawal, A. and Ostrom, E. 2001 Collective action, property rights, and decentralization in resource use in India and Nepal. Politics and Society 29: 485–514.2 Schlager, E. and Ostrom, E. 1992 Property rights regimes and natural resources: a conceptual analysis. Land Economics 68: 249–262.3 Agrawal, A. and Ostrom, E. 2008 Decentralization and community-based forestry: learning from experience. In: Webb, E.L. and Shivakoti, G.P. (eds.) Decentralization, forests and rural communities: policy outcomes in South and Southeast Asia. Sage, Los Angeles, CA, USA.4 Fortmann, L. 1985 The tree tenure factor in agroforestry with particular reference to Africa. Agroforestry Systems 2: 229–251.

4. Tenure security

There are many dimensions to tenure, but security of rights is usually seen as a primary variable affecting outcomes for both forests and people. At the same time, security alone does not determine outcomes. This section provides a brief overview of current thinking on tenure security as it relates to forests ad forest people.

Forest tenure insecurity and lack of clarity are often associated with forest degradation and deforestation (Chomitz et al. 2007). Deforestation has often been a means of demonstrating use and asserting one’s rights in relation to other claimants, particularly in contested or agricultural frontier areas but also in places where there is little competition for land and forest is plentiful. In some cases, land clearing has been the basis for a legal claim to a land title, although many of these laws have since been changed.


Forest tenure security, however, has mixed results for forests. On the one hand, secure tenure means that sustainable forest management is more attractive, but so are investments in land improvements that may involve conversion to other uses (Chomitz et al. 2007, Tacconi 2007). Land titling to colonists may lead to land sales and migration further into forested frontiers. Titling can also involve sophisticated or more powerful outsiders taking advantage of local people who are uninformed or overly trusting. At the same time, investments in payments for environmental services (Grieg-Gran et al. 2005, Pagiola et al. 2005) and community forestry enterprises (Pagdee et al. 2006, Larson and Mendoza-Lewis 2009) are less likely without secure tenure.

Whether longer-term investments involve forest conservation or conversion, their success is often associated with secure tenure (Pagdee et al. 2006) and, by providing such opportunities and incentives, secure tenure is more clearly associated with positive outcomes for people (Chomitz et al. 2007). If tenure is not secure, more powerful interest groups can seize the lands and resources of poor users; the state may protect the interests of the former. Although security does not, of course, guarantee increased livelihood benefits, insecure tenure is clearly a disadvantage. According to Di Gregorio et al. (2008: 9), ‘property rights … affect future accumulation of assets and vulnerability to future shocks and possible loss of assets. Moreover, property rights over valuable assets do not only provide wealth but also status, both of which in turn influence the power that people have in their society.’

But what is tenure security and how is it measured? According to Poffenberger (1990), tenure security refers to the degree to which an individual or group believes its relationship to land and other resources is safe, rather than in jeopardy. For Mwangi and Meinzen-Dick (2009: 310), security reflects ‘the ability of an individual to appropriate resources on a continuous basis, free from imposition, dispute or approbation from outside sources, as well as the ability to claim returns from investment in the resource’. An important difference between these two definitions is that the former is based entirely on perception, whereas the latter refers to practice. It is important to recognise that in some cases people may believe their rights to be secure even when they are not.

In addition, other conceptual problems arise around the issue of security. Sjaastad and Bromley (2000) argue that tenure security, or the assurance of rights, is often confused with the content or substance of rights. For example, a community may have a secure right to extract certain forest resources from a particular location, even though the state has the legal right to grant a logging concession in that same forest; in this case, the community’s right is not insecure, it is simply limited and perhaps inadequate. Arnot et al. (2011) emphasise the importance of conceptual clarity in

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terms of both the definitions of security and the variables chosen to study it. In their review of more than three dozen studies of tenure security, they find substantial lack of clarity; two common measures used as proxies are variables about content rather than assurance. Those are legal title and duration of tenure, neither of which are good measures of security.

A title may or may not increase the security of possession. For example, to be meaningful, the right to possession established by a title must be protected and defended by the granting institution (presumably the state) if this is threatened. Not all states are functional or fair, and not all people necessarily have the same access to state protection. Several authors have demonstrated that those who have greater access to the legal system, through wealth or manipulation, have won out in tenure battles even if other, poorer actors have legal title and/or legitimate prior claims (Nygren 2004, Broegaard 2005). Research in Africa has demonstrated that customary tenure and lack of title have not inhibited land investments, suggesting no need for title to increase security (Peters 2009).

In addition, although in many cases titles can grant security, in others they may undermine it. Bromley (2005) argues that titles can increase insecurity for the poorest sectors by facilitating dispossession (see also Cousins et al. 2005). This is because titling can create opportunities for elite capture (Mwangi and Meinzen-Dick 2009). Furthermore, security in traditional property systems is embedded in social relations, and these relations are altered by the issuance of title: ‘The issuance of formal title to


the poor means that they must now decide to exchange their embeddedness in one community for an embeddedness in another community. In the absence of reasonable assurance that the new community (the government) can offer more effective protection than the current one, the switch may not be obviously superior’ (Bromley 2005: 7). Hence, in some cases, informal or customary relations are more important – and more secure – than formal titles (Cousins et al. 2005).

Duration of tenure also is not necessarily a good measure of security. A short-term concessionaire can have a very secure right for a limited period of time, whereas a long-term right can be highly insecure. A short-term right may have high probability of being renewed (Costello and Kaffine 2008).

What is a good measure of tenure security? Perception alone is not necessarily sufficient, as people may not be aware of the extent to which their rights are vulnerable or under threat (Mwangi, personal communication); similarly, a community may believe its security has increased because it has mapped its territory, even if there is no legal recognition of that map. Security of tenure is influenced by numerous other variables such as the legitimacy of the right and the extent to which

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Recommended reading:

1 Arnot, C., Luckert, M.K. and Boxall, P.C. 2011 What is tenure security? Conceptual implications for empirical research. Land Economics 87: 297–311.2 Pagdee, A., Kim, Y. and Daugherty, P.J. 2006 What makes community forest management successful: a meta-study from community forests throughout the world. Society and Natural Resources 19: 33–52.3 Alden Wily, L. 2008 Custom and commonage in Africa: rethinking the orthodoxies. Land Use Policy 25: 43–52.4 Cousins, B., Cousins, T., Hornby, D., Kingwill, R., Royston, L. and Smit, W. 2005 Will formalizing property rights reduce poverty in South Africa’s ‘second economy’? Questioning the mythologies of Hernando de Soto. Policy Brief No. 18. Institute for Poverty, Land and Agrarian Studies (PLAAS), Cape Town, South Africa.5 Otsuka, K. and Place, F. (eds.) 2001 Land tenure and natural resource management: a comparative study of agrarian communities in Asia and Africa. Johns Hopkins University Press, Washington DC.

it is clear, uncontested and enforced. A right that is accepted as legitimate, such as one that has been clearly negotiated by relevant stakeholders, is more likely to be respected by others (Hayes 2007; see also Ostrom and Nagendra 2006). Rights that are unclear or challenged by other claimants increase vulnerability. Rights that are not enforced, such as the defence of property boundaries, may be subject to encroachment. At the same time, rights may be overlapping and shared but still secure, such as in numerous cases of effective common pool resource management (Gibson et al. 2000). Finally, given the complexity of rights bundles and the different rules associated with land, forests and specific resources, it is important to specify which rights one is referring to in any study of security. In summary, measuring security accurately will most often require a combination of variables.

5. Theoretical and policy approaches to property

Although a full, historical literature review on property or tenure rights is beyond the scope of this guide, it is useful to have some understanding of the variety of approaches in literature and practice. Ellsworth (2002) provides a useful summary of four main schools of thought around property, which she names as follows: property rights, agrarian, common property and institutionalists. These four schools are not necessarily exclusive, and despite some differences based on their theoretical underpinnings, they are probably better described as tendencies or groupings around research priorities. As there is some overlap between them, then, it is possible in some cases for a particular theorist or researcher to belong to more than one school. This section provides only a short summary of each.

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The property rights school is characterised by the traditional economic thought of a range of economists from David Ricardo and Jeremy Bentham to Hernando de Soto and Klaus Deininger (and others at the World Bank). What these economic theorists have in common is a commitment to the belief that private, individual and tradable property titles are ‘an indispensable precondition to economic growth and development’ (Ellsworth 2002: 9). Most importantly, these analysts believe individual tradable titles grant the titleholder the possibility of using land as collateral for obtaining credit and mobilising investments that would improve productivity. It is argued that increased land values then promote dynamic land markets that allocate resources to the most efficient managers. (This argument is central to Hernando de Soto’s The Mystery of Capital, which has been highly influential among key policymakers but controversial among other researchers and practitioners.)

Ellsworth’s second set of thinkers, ‘an eclectic group of economic theorists, development policy analysts, and social justice activists’ that she puts into the agrarian structure school, accept many of the premises of the property rights school but reject the argument that private, individual titles lead to optimum economic and social results (an argument also rejected by the groups below). Hence, priorities and research questions differ from those of the former theorists. Their priority is on social justice for small- and medium-scale farmers, preventing or reversing land concentration and thus identifying the best way to promote land or agrarian reform. These researchers, practitioners and activists consider the ways in which private, tradable titles can harm small-scale farmers and increase insecurity; they argue

Table 1. Main tendencies in property theory and practice

‘Property rights’ school

Agrarian structure school

Common property school

Institutionalists school

Primary emphasis

Private individual titles as central to economic development

Social justice through agrarian reform and land redistribution

Common property as an alternative to private individual property

Power relations and political institutions as they shape the social relations of property

Discipline Economics Political economy

Multidisciplinary Political economy

Key current theorists

Hernando de Soto

Michael Carter Elinor Ostrom Daniel Bromley

Source: Based on Ellsworth (2002)Note: Although not mentioned by Ellsworth with regard to these four key tendencies, the discipline of law also has a large place in property debates.


that land sales may have nothing to do with efficiency and believe that limiting the tradability of titles and market regulation may promote tenure security. Some of these researchers would align themselves with the institutionalists school below, but their work has a ‘distinct emphasis on problems related to the distribution of land’ (Ellsworth 2002: 23). Ellsworth mentions the work of Michael Carter and the University of Wisconsin-Madison Land Tenure Center as exemplifying this school.

Common property theorists have a different set of priorities. What sets them apart is their response to the simplistic assumption that individual land and resource ownership is necessarily better and that common property leads to over-exploitation. Common property scholarship is epitomised by the work of Elinor Ostrom, Fikret Berkes, Bonnie McCay and others (e.g. McCay and Acheson 1987, Berkes 1989, Feeny et al. 1990, Ostrom 1990). It has resulted in the debunking of Hardin’s ‘tragedy of the commons’ thesis and in a now widely accepted distinction between open-access areas and managed commons. Common property theory is particularly important for the understanding of forests as a common pool resource, for which exclusion is difficult but use is subtractable (one person’s consumption diminishes another’s). As noted previously, forestland, in comparison with agricultural land for example, tends more often to include state and collective ownership or management, rather than formal private individual ownership (Sunderlin et al. 2008; see also the UN Food and Agriculture Organization’s periodic Forest Resource Assessments).

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Ellsworth (2002) distinguishes a fourth set of theorists under the term institutionalists. This school differs from common property theorists mainly based on the kinds of research questions it asks, although there is considerable overlap between the groups. Institutionalists focus on the broader political economic context and on all kinds of property regimes, whereas common property theorists tend to focus more on the internal rules and governance structures of a particular common property. In contrast to the more traditional property rights school, this school bases its inquiries on the power relations that shape the social relationship of property. Members of this school argue that ‘political power and the distribution of resource endowments at any one point in time is more important than property type in determining who gets security of tenure and who doesn’t’ (Ellsworth 2002: 17). For this school, titles and the nature of property regimes are ‘the reflection and outcome’ of social institutions that reflect a society’s values. Daniel Bromley and Douglass North are examples of this school of thought, although Bromley has also been an important contributor to common property theory.

Palmer (2007) takes a different – and also useful – approach to analysing contrasting views regarding property or land rights. She bases her analysis specifically on the policy arena, drawing on both the literature and participation in conferences and ‘expert meetings’ with land specialists. She identifies two highly contrasting camps, which she calls ‘hard’ and ‘soft’, and which, in their analysis and policy ‘debates’, largely ‘talk past each other’ (Palmer 2007: 9–10). The former is based on a ‘hard scientific world of precision and certainty’, epitomised by the International Federation of Surveyors (FIG). The FIG is involved directly in the practice of titling,



1 Ellsworth, L. 2002 A place in the world: tenure security and community livelihoods, a literature review. Forest Trends, Washington, DC.2 Palmer, R. 2007. Literature review of governance and secure access to land. North South Consultants Exchange, Governance and Social Development Resource Centre, UK Department for International Development (DFID), London.3 Hobley, M. 2007 Where in the world is there pro-poor forest policy and tenure reform? Rights and Resources Initiative, Washington, DC.

promoting surveying, mapping, titling and registration and the installation of computerised and centralised land administration systems. The FIG has played an important role in this regard in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. Its point of view is in line with the property rights school and the World Bank (although the World Bank has begun to recognise some aspects of the complexity and the importance of collective, as well as individual, rights).

In contrast, the ‘soft’ camp, a group of theorists and practitioners shaped largely by experiences in Africa, sees land tenure as highly complex, ambiguous and

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uncertain. They see tenure arrangements and rights as continually evolving through the interaction of custom and tradition with new rules and norms. This perspective is more in line with the common property and institutionalist schools above, and its proponents are generally quite concerned about the potential negative consequences of the ‘hard’ approach under these kinds of conditions.

These two camps may primarily be shaped by disciplinary differences, with the former populated by surveyors focused on technology and geospatial information and the latter by anthropologists. Similarly, one is more likely to find traditional economists in the property rights school and political economists as well as scholars from other disciplines in the other three groups identified by Ellsworth.

6. The nature of tenure rights

This section is aimed at understanding both de jure and de facto tenure rights in practice. A statutory or de jure right concerns a set of rules established and protected by the state (e.g. registered land titles, concession contracts, forestry laws and regulations). De facto rights are patterns of interactions established outside the formal realm of law. They include customary rights, a set of community rules and regulations inherited from ancestors and accepted, reinterpreted and enforced by the community, and which may or may not be recognised by the state. The first part of this section discusses the nature of de jure rights. The second addresses de facto rights but primarily focuses on customary rights and common issues related to customary rights – specifically, the nature of those rights, legal pluralism and problems with the formalisation of rights.

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Types of tenure rights (de jure)Property is often formally classified as either public or private. Public land – generally understood to mean ‘state land’ (although some argue that public land is owned by ‘the public’) – may, in turn, be owned by the central government, state or provincial governments in federal systems or municipal/local governments. Private land usually refers to land titled to an individual or corporation. Open access is also sometimes mentioned as a type of land tenure category, but the land is still formally either public or private. Open access thus refers to a type of management regime (or, in particular, the absence of management) or a set of rights that is not enforced.

Common or communal property is often mentioned as a separate category of land tenure but in fact, despite its distinct characteristics, is usually under either the public or private domain.4 That is, communal tenure systems and common property may exist either on lands that are formally under the domain of the state or on privately owned (communal) lands (McKean 2000). Communities may have private land titles, as in indigenous territories in Bolivia or the Philippines, or they may have another kind of land grant. These grants may be temporary, such as those awarded through projects, conditional programmes or concession contracts (such as community forest concessions in the Democratic Republic of Congo or Cameroon), or permanent, through the national constitution or national laws (as in indigenous lands in Brazil or community forests in Nepal). Grants made by lower-level legal instruments such as presidential or ministerial decrees may be more easily rescinded, even if they are stated to be permanent. In some cases, private individuals or households may also have land grants on state lands. This is the case of 50-year land contracts for households in Vietnam, or in some highland indigenous communities in Guatemala, where households officially lease land on municipal ejidos but otherwise have rights that are fully alienable. Plantation developers in Uganda have long-term (50-year) land leases for pine trees (Banana, personal communication).

These classifications, however, only refer to land. In many cases, rights to forests and trees are tied to land rights. In other cases, however, these rights may be separate, such that one actor or entity may hold the land rights while another holds the forest resource rights. For example, a community may be granted land rights, but the state can still grant private logging concessions in their forests. Such concessions may or may not require local consent. In Ghana, for example, a 1962 law vested all rights to trees in the president, but the 1997 Timber Resource Management Act redefined those rights, such that timber rights on land with titles or farms can no longer be granted without the written authorisation of the individual, group or owner

4 Nevertheless, commune land in China is not considered to be either public or private (Ruiz Peréz, personal communication). See also Appell (n.d.) for a critique of the common property concept.


concerned (Marfo 2009). In Uganda, a reserved tree species policy stated that certain high-value trees were owned by the state, even if they were located on private land (Banana, personal communication).

Conversely, people may have de jure rights to trees but not to the land. For example, also in Ghana, under the modified taungya system, the state owns the land, but those who plant the trees are entitled to a portion of future income from their sale. There may also be different rights associated with trees that have been planted or that are naturally occurring and with regard to the type of land (e.g. common or family) on which they occur (Marfo 2009). Tree-planting may strengthen one’s land rights and thus be prohibited in some cases (Otsuka and Place 2001).

Rights to trees may be more important for communities than rights to land per se. In Pando, Bolivia, where the main source of livelihoods is Brazil nuts, a system of customary rights to networks of trees has evolved. As legal rights have been established through land titling in recent years, communities have had to work with surveyors, who tend to prefer straight lines, to make sure that complex tree harvesting routes were included in the correct community title (Cronkleton et al. 2009).

Rights to land, forests or trees may also have a temporal component. For example, seasonal pastoralists have rights to highland forests in Nepal; the chicle gum law in Guatemala, mentioned earlier, grants gum extractors access to certain trees during the tapping season. Nevertheless, the greater the complexity, the more likely these rights will not be captured in de jure regimes.

De jure tenure regimes, in general, define the distribution of rights and responsibilities between the state and local communities (and, of course, the private sector). These are likely to vary


1 Sunderlin, W., Hatcher, J. and Liddle, M. 2008 From exclusion to ownership? Challenges and opportunities in advancing forest tenure reform. Rights and Resource Initiative, Washington, DC.2 Otsuka, K. and Place, F. (eds.) 2001 Land tenure and natural resource management: a comparative study of agrarian communities in Asia and Africa. Johns Hopkins University Press, Washington DC.3 Meinzen-Dick, D. 2006 Shifting boundaries of tenure systems and security of access to common property. Paper presented at International Association for the Study of Common Property (IASCP) conference, Ubud, Bali.4 McKean, M. 2000 Common property: what is it, what is it good for, and what makes it work? In: Gibson, C., McKean, M.A. and Ostrom, E. (eds.) People and forests: communities, institutions and governance, 27–55. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, USA.

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across the landscape. For example, Ojha et al. (2008) provide an interesting analysis of state versus community rights – referred to as power-sharing – under six different de jure forest regimes in Nepal (community forestry, collaborative forestry, leasehold forestry, watershed management, buffer zone forestry and integrated conservation and development). These mosaics of tenure regimes are cross-cut by at least two other important arenas of resource rights governed by statutory law: subsoil (especially mineral and petroleum) and now carbon rights.

Finally, de jure regimes by definition depend on the state, and therefore the characteristics of those regimes are strongly influenced by the nature of the state, e.g. levels of corruption, rule of law, the independence and fairness of courts, etc. It is not particularly surprising that in weak or corrupt states, or in distant regions where there is little state presence, informal or customary arrangements may be more important for local people.

Customary and informal (or non-formal5) rights (de facto)The configurations of tenure discussed in the previous section refer primarily to de jure rights, but certain aspects, such the specifics of rights to trees or parts of trees, or the meaning of tree-planting, are likely to have many dimensions beyond the realm of formal law. In addition, rights in practice, in general, are far more complex than these classifications suggest. That is, the bundle of rights is likely to include a combination of rights that are defined by statutory law (de jure) and rights that are defined locally, through de facto or customary institutions.

Not all de facto land claims have a basis in customary rights, of course. The most obvious example of this would be land-grabbing by powerful actors, where ‘rights’ are not the basis of the claim at all. Another example might be that of agricultural frontier colonisation by peasant colonists in Latin America or, in general, groups of migrants who settle in new areas in Africa or Asia. In the Latin America case, ‘the right to land’ and historical patterns of behaviour involving frontier migration to settle or ‘open the frontier’6 establish the local legitimacy of claims, but it is not always apparent that such groups would have a customary right to the area they have claimed (also, in some cases, these lands comprised the territories of indigenous populations). This section focuses mainly on customary rights.

Customary land claims may challenge the validity even of the broad public–private categories established by law. In particular, many traditional groups argue that their

5 The term ‘non-formal’ is being increasingly used to emphasize that these institutions are not formalised or official. They are not, however, ‘casual’ or ‘unceremonious’, as per other meanings of the term ‘informal’.6 Ideas strongly influenced by John Locke’s labour theory of property.


customary rights have greater legitimacy than the state’s legal claim because, among other reasons, they predate the existence of the state. In Nicaragua, for example, indigenous leaders rejected the first land titles they were granted because they were written in such a way that affirmed the state’s authority to do the granting (CEJUDHCAN 2006, Larson et al. 2008). More remote traditional communities in Indonesia and elsewhere have long enjoyed their right to govern by custom without state interference (Colfer and Pfund 2011; see also Scott 2009 on the fictional country of Zomia, based on Southeast Asia).

What is custom, however, and who decides? It is widely recognised in scholarship on Africa that ‘customary law’ and ‘customary tenure’ are largely a construction of ‘colonial officials and African leaders’ (Colson 1971, cited in Peters 2009: 1317). That is, defining custom at any point in time is open to a certain amount of interpretation. Customary practices are flexible, adaptive and dynamic; they do not occur in isolation but rather interact with outside institutions such as the state and statutory regimes. In addition, people making demands based on so-called customary rights are certainly capable of bias and self-interest, and customary tenure systems may be highly inequitable (Platteau 1996, 2000).

At the same time, the suppression of local forest rights historically has been well documented in a number of cases. Particularly from the 1800s, customary forest rights were denied and customary practices criminalised by colonial governments

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in Asia and Africa and independent states in Latin America under both timber and wilderness policies. See, for example, Guha (2001) and Gadjil and Guha (1995) on India; Springate-Baginski and Blaikie (2007) on India and Nepal; Peluso (1992) on Indonesia; Peluso and Vandergeest (2001) on Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand; and Neumann (1998) on Africa (see Alden Wily and Mbaya (2001) for a more recent overview in more than a dozen countries in east and southern Africa).

The discussion of customary tenure systems raises several issues that have been abundantly addressed in the literature, particularly on Africa. These include the nature of customary systems (shared, overlapping, embedded), legal pluralism, the formalisation of customary rights and customary authority. The first three are discussed here, and the last is discussed in the section ‘Inside communities: Issues of power and differentiation’..

The nature of customary tenure. According to Diaw (2005), customary land tenure systems among forest-dwelling groups in Africa include: (1) ‘collective property’, or the territories held or claimed by groups of people (e.g. communities, tribes), referred to in this document as communal property; (2) open-access property, where anyone passing through can harvest plants or animals at will; (3) common property, in which products or areas are open to group members but denied to outsiders without special permission; and (4) ‘private holdings’, or portions of the common property that are managed and in some sense ‘owned’ by individuals or families. These categories are hierarchical. That is, collective or communal property refers to the entire area or territory of the group, within which there are typically both open-access and common property areas. In Diaw’s formulation, private holdings are drawn from common property.

These categories appear be broadly applicable in Asia and Latin America as well, although definitions and use of specific terms may vary. For example, according to Bruce (1998), common property refers to areas that are used, managed and regulated by a group of people, while the web site of the International Association for the Study of the Commons (IASC) defines it as ‘a formal or informal property regime that allocates a bundle of rights to a group’. This latter definition fits better with the concept of communal property above, as a broader term that refers to both common and individual/household (as well as open-access) areas within a physical territory that has been allocated to a group. At the same time, Bruce’s definition might distinguish between the areas assigned for common use and those assigned to individuals, households or families within a typical communal area.

At the same time, even an area that is entirely divided up and assigned to households, with or without titles, may still have a customary, collective component in social


organisation and land or forest management. In the Guatemalan highlands, the community of Chancol holds a collective title to 15 000 ha, although all but one small area has been distributed among the representatives of the 504 original associates (Elías et al. 2009). A board of directors holds the title and is the primary institution through which rules for land and forest use throughout the ‘community’ are made. In another example, an indigenous community in the highlands of Chenhalo, in the state of Chiapas, Mexico, landholdings have been divided into small plots based on kinship. Nevertheless, customary institutions were retooled to organise collective commercial coffee production by dedicating a small area on each plot to coffee (Barry, personal communication).

Customary rights are typically multiple and overlapping, contingent on various factors, such as person, place and season (Appell 1986, 1997, Okoth-Ogendo 1989, Berry 1993, Bruce and Migot-Adholla 1994). ‘For example, a farmer may have the right to plant a crop on a piece of land, but anyone can cross that land to get water, pastoralists may have the right to graze their herds on that land in the fallow season, family elders may have the right to allocate or reallocate that land, and the state may claim ultimate “ownership” of the resource’ (Mwangi and Meinzen-Dick 2009: 296). Boundaries that appear ‘fuzzy’ are common, contrasting sharply with the idea of exclusive private property (Verdery 1999). Pastoral systems, which need grazing areas and transhumance corridors seasonally, are a typical example. In particular, pastoralists need to ensure access for pasture and water resources with changing weather patterns and in times of scarcity. Flexibility, however, does not mean that these areas are open access; rather, rights may be ‘ordered and hierarchical … with clear obligations held by each rights holder’ (Mwangi and Dohrn 2008: 241).

These multiple and overlapping rights occur not only at these broader scales, but also at very local scales. A single tree may be subject to multiple users and uses (Fortmann 1985). It is particularly easy to misunderstand overlapping rights with regard to underprivileged groups. In the Gambia, women planted gardens to claim land, and men planted orchards on these garden plots in order to claim it back (Schroeder 1999). Rocheleau and Edmunds (1997) provide detailed maps of nested tenure rights of men and women, examining their respective control of the site, plant or product, their responsibility to provide products from that site to the household and their labour time invested. They argue that women have much more say in resource use, what they call ‘flexible complementarity under uneven relations of power’ (p. 1368), than projects often assume from simplified models of gender exclusion and fixed hierarchies.

Another crucial element of such customary systems is their basis in kinship, which often defines group membership, particularly in Africa (Agbosu 2000, Diaw 2005,

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1997). As Cousins (2007: 293) writes of South Africa, ‘[l]and and resource rights are directly embedded in a range of social relationships and units, including households and kinship networks; the relevant social identities are often multiple, overlapping and therefore “nested” or layered in character (e.g. individual rights within households, households within kinship networks, kinship networks within wider “communities”)’.

On the one hand, many authors have argued that the layers of embedded tenure systems characteristic of customary lands result in resilience and flexibility, which have allowed these systems to survive in the face of persistent antagonism from, and confrontation with, the dominant, more discrete view of land tenure (Berry 1993, Okoth-Ogendo 2002), as well as difficult environmental and contextual changes. On the other hand, the degree of flexibility in customary systems has also been questioned, given that not everyone wins in negotiations, as those who are more powerful may infringe on the rights of weaker groups (Peters 2002, 2004). With the pressure – and opportunity, for some – to privatise or define property rights more discretely, as well as increasing competition and conflict over land in general, the question of embeddedness leads to the need to analyse ‘the type of social and political relations in which land is situated, particularly with reference to relations of inequality’ (Peters 2004: 278).

Legal pluralism. Legal pluralism refers to the coexistence and interaction of multiple legal orders (Meinzen-Dick and Pradhan 2001) or to the different legal mechanisms applicable to the same situation (Vanderlinden 1989). These legal orders refer to substate political organisations with their own normative


1 Agbosu, L.K. 2000 Land law in Ghana: contradiction between Anglo-American and customary tenure conceptions and practices. Working Paper 33. Land Tenure Center, University of Wisconsin- Madison.2 Diaw, C. 1997 Si, Nda Bot, and Ayong: shifting cultivation, land use, and property rights in southern Cameroon. Vol. 21e. ODI Rural Development Forestry Network Paper. ODI Rural Development Forestry Network, London.3 Peters, P. 2002 The limits of negotiability: security, equity and class formation in Africa’s land systems. In: Juul, K. and Lund, C. (eds.) Negotiating property in Africa, 45–66. Heinemann, Portsmouth, NH, USA.4 Mwangi, E. and Meinzen-Dick, R. 2009 Understanding property rights in land and natural resource management. In: Kirsten, J.F., Dorward, A.R., Poulton, C. and Vink, N. (eds.) Institutional economics perspectives on African agricultural development, 295–318. International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), Washington, DC.


constructions, usually in contradiction with those of the state (Marfo et al. 2010). These different normative orders may be based on so-called folk, customary or religious systems (von Benda-Beckmann 1997, von Benda-Beckmann and von Benda-Beckmann 2002). ‘Where state law officially makes matters of social and ethnic origin irrelevant and allocates economic and political rights and duties on the basis of abstract equality, village laws… may do just the opposite (von Benda-Beckmann and von Benda-Beckmann 2001: 3-4).

Although customary legal systems are usually seen as subordinate to state law, the coexistence of parallel systems may create conflicts and multiple sources of legitimising claims over tenure rights, leading to ‘forum shopping’ (von Benda-Beckmann 1981), where actors seek and use the legal system that best supports their interests. In natural resource management specifically, it can also lead to what Onibon et al. (1999) call a ‘sterile dualism’, whereby the state imposes laws and regulations that are simply impractical and incompatible with local practices; as a consequence, the rules are simply ignored, while local people’s behaviour is criminalised (Benjamin 2008).

There has been extensive scholarly debate over the best way in which to address these parallel legal systems with regard to land tenure, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa. Platteau (1996) discusses two such suggestions. The first proposes the complete suppression and ‘drastic alteration’ of customary systems, which are

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seen as completely inadequate for supporting long-term economic growth and development in the region. The second, supported by the World Bank, is based on the ‘evolutionary theory of land rights’ and a belief that African land institutions are sufficiently dynamic as to evolve, in response to market forces and government intervention, in a more ‘efficiency-enhancing’ direction (Platteau 1996: 30). Both of these strategies prioritise the allocation of private individual land titles, the second as an efficient economic response to increasing land scarcity and competition over time.

Platteau (1996: 73) critiques both strategies but focuses on the more appealing evolutionary theory, arguing that fundamental conditions for its success do not exist; in particular, that it is based on the naïve premise that ‘land titling can be expected to increase land security for all customary rightsholders’. Following other theorists, he proposes that formalised land tenure systems may not be necessary, and solutions should be based on indigenous practices and non-formal procedures as much as possible.

These debates parallel the discussion of ‘state-led’ versus ‘community-led’ land reforms (e.g. Sikor and Mueller 2009). State-led reform assumes the unification of statutory and customary systems – a strategy that has led to massive administrative hurdles and that fails to address the ‘multiplicity of tenure situations’ (Peters 2009: 1319). Yet community-led alternatives are also fundamentally flawed, as they fail to recognise the grave inequities and conflicts arising in decentralisations and in current land transfers (Peters 2009). Peters cautions against separating tenure from its ‘social, cultural, and political-economic matrices’ and in favour of casting land relations in terms of general principles rather than strict rules, with careful attention to the use of those principles and ‘the production of winners and losers’ (p. 1322).

Recognising the dynamic interplay among ‘state authority, local power relations and inter-group resource competition’ (Fitzpatrick 2005: 454), Alden Wily (2008: 46) argues that statutory and customary rights are


1 Benjamin, C.E. 2008 Legal pluralism and decentralization: natural resource management in Mali. World Development 36: 2255–2276.2 Fitzpatrick, C. 2006 Evolution and chaos in property rights systems: the third world tragedy of contested access. Yale Law Journal 115: 996– 1048.3 von Benda-Beckmann, D. 1981 Forum shopping and shopping forums. Journal of Legal Pluralism 19: 117–159.4 Platteau, J-P. 1996 The evolutionary theory of land rights as applied to Sub-Saharan Africa: a critical assessment. Development and Change 27: 29–86.


not an either/or proposition, but rather that customary rights ultimately ‘depend profoundly on the support of statutes’ to assure that they will be upheld; only very remote areas may continue to be an exception (Colfer 2011).

Hazards and opportunities of formal recognition. The recognition of land rights means bringing customary rights into the formal sphere. There are a number of ways to do this and a number of associated risks and opportunities.

Fitzpatrick (2005) presents four models by which customary lands have been recognised in Africa, each implying increasing degrees of state intervention. He argues that the central factor in defining which model to use should be the source of tenure insecurity affecting the community: the more external the insecurity, the less the state should interfere in internal affairs and, rather, should focus on defending the perimeter of the community’s customary area; the more internal, the greater the role for the state in mediating decisions over access. The models range from simply recognising an area in the land registry with no internal intervention, to assigning an agent to represent the group, requiring the group to form an incorporated entity or creating a multi-stakeholder land board. Nevertheless, an assessment of four cases, in Ghana, Burkina Faso, Indonesia and Guatemala, suggests that the models actually used have little relation to the degree of state intervention or its goals, which may be to support or to suppress customary rights (Marfo et al. 2010).

Another problem is that the process of formalisation itself can cause the breakdown of property rights systems into open- or contested-access areas. This can be caused by the superposition of, and conflict between, formal and customary property systems – leading to forum shopping, as mentioned above (Fitzpatrick 2006). Formalisation can increase competition and lead to land-grabbing (Cronkleton et al. 2009), favour some groups over others or ignore existing customary arrangements (Sikor and Thanh 2007, Meinzen-Dick and Mwangi 2008, Sikor and Nguyen 2009). It can create opportunities for elite capture by more powerful players, external or internal to the community, who obtain rights to lands or forests that had previously been under the customary control of the community; this is particularly true when formalisation involves titling where there are multiple, overlapping rights (Mwangi 2007; see also Cousins 2007, Peters 2002, 2004). Formalising property rights to individuals severs the web of multiple legitimate and distinct claims of women, youth, seasonal users and others (Meinzen-Dick and Mwangi 2008).

Based on the study of several African cases, in Ghana, Côte d’Ivoire and Benin, Berry (2009) argues that interventions intended to clarify property rights, improve accountability and increase participation have provoked rather than alleviated conflict. Because land claims are based on ‘claims on authority and social belonging,

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pressures to privatise or clarify ownership have intensified debates over citizenship and governance as well as over land claims per se’ (Berry 2009: 23). That is, when claims are based on tradition and custom, people seek to prove their rights through their ancestry. Different actors vying for rights will use a variety of narratives to defend their claims, depending on what is seen as increasing the legitimacy of their claim in each case (Berry 2009; see also Fortmann 1985).

In addition, formalising land rights can bring communities under the control of the state, subjecting them to regulations and other obligations that they had previously been able to avoid. In some cases, this may improve forest management, such as in areas previously subject to poor management or open access, but it may also cause the breakdown of customary institutions that were more effective at managing resources (Leach and Fairhead 2001, Li 2002, Pokharel et al. 2007) and increase hardship through the imposition of rules that are locally inappropriate (Ballabh et al. 2002, Edmunds and Wollenberg 2003, Colchester et al. 2006a, Cousins 2007). As suggested by Fitzpatrick’s various models, no matter how formalisation is carried out, it is likely to affect in some way, for better or worse, customary practices, the way in which decisions are made, local rule-making and local culture.

Formalisation can also bring important benefits to communities. Perhaps most importantly, it can increase the legitimacy of customary rights in the face of competition. Formal tenure rights have been a central demand in particular for many indigenous and traditional communities. In Latin America, indigenous groups, after a century of assimilation policies (Van Cott 1994, Tresierra 2000), have fought for autonomy and self-governance often on the basis of their ancestral territories (Roldán Ortiga 2004). They have also sought to clarify and reinforce their borders and gain formal legitimacy for exclusion rights in light of the encroachment by outsiders into areas claimed by the community (Stocks 2005, Hayes 2007, Larson


1 Fitzpatrick, D. 2005 ‘best practice’ options for the legal recognition of customary tenure. Development and Change 36: 449–475.2 Meinzen-Dick, R. and Mwangi, E. 2008 Cutting the web of interests: pitfalls of formalizing property rights. Land Use Policy 26: 36–43.3 Sikor, T. and Mueller, D. 2009 The limits of state-led land reform: an introduction. World Development 37: 1307–1316. [Introduction to Special issue, see other articles as well].4 Larson, A.M., Barry, D. and Dahal, G.R. 2010 New rights for forest-based communities? Understanding processes of forest tenure reform. International Forestry Review 12: 78–96.5 Larson, A.M. and Dahal, G.R. eds. 2012 Special issue on forest tenure reform. Conservation and Society 10: 77–208.


et al. 2008) and often by the state as well (see, for example, the legal case of Awas Tingni in Nicaragua; Anaya and Grossman 2002). Similarly, the Ikalahan people in the Philippines began the battle for the formal recognition of their rights in the late 1960s in response to outside encroachment from land-grabbers. In 1968, a few prominent politicians obtained title to about 200 ha of tribal lands, and in 1970, the government was planning to occupy more than 6000 ha and build a vacation resort called Marcos City. The Ikalahan won a 1972 court ruling voiding the claims of these external actors; they finally obtained the land title more than 30 years later, in 2006 (Pulhin et al. 2008).

Formal rights can increase the resources legally available to communities, secure their access for the future, provide a clear locus for challenge in the case of infringements and increase incomes. All of these have significant implications. Communities may only have had access previously that was informal or illegal, increasing risk and lowering potential income. For example, in the Petén, Guatemala, communities had no previous right to use or sell timber resources, but the granting of community forest concessions has led to the creation of several successful enterprises involved in logging as well as the export of some non-timber forest products (Monterroso and Barry 2009, Radachowsky et al. 2011). In Pando, Bolivia, incomes from Brazil nuts have increased because of the formation of a producers’ cooperative, COINACAPA, made possible in part by the increase in tenure security (Cronkleton et al. 2009).

7. Other important actors and variables

This section discusses several additional factors that shape tenure rights and are thus also important to understanding rights in practice. They are: the role of the state, competing interests in forests and forestland, the role of collective action, issues internal to communities and two alternative (or complementary) approaches to tenure rights. Each of these topics warrants far more space than can be provided in this manual and will by necessity be highly simplified here.

The role of the state As is apparent from the previous discussions, the state plays a central role in relation to forest tenure rights. In any particular setting, however, the specific role played by


the state, or by any particular actor within the state bureaucracy, is influenced by a number of factors.

In general, the state is seen as having several mandates that relate to natural resources and forest peoples in developing nations. They include: the generation of wealth, jobs, etc., for development; the protection of the nation’s natural wealth for future generations (enforcing natural resource laws and regulations); the protection of property rights; the guarantee of citizens’ basic rights; and, with recent efforts such as the United Nations’ Millennium Development Goals, efforts to alleviate poverty and guarantee food security in light of a changing climate.

Although the state has a mandate to play these roles in the interest of the population, in practice, of course, the state is rarely a neutral facilitator; rather, it constitutes another interest group – or many interests and interest groups within a differentiated state and state bureaucracy – in relation to natural resources. This is particularly apparent in relation to forests, given that states are, globally, the primary owners of forests. In addition, the interests of ‘the state’ may include personal enrichment and corruption (see Kolstad and Søreide 2009).

These multiple and contradictory roles have implications for forest tenure rights in a number of ways. They can be simplified into two tendencies that largely explain the centralisation of forest ownership and control both historically and today. On the one hand, forests are seen as common, public goods and strategic resources that need both protection and ‘rational use’ in order to provide goods, services and income for the present and the future. On the other hand, rights to forests and forest resources consistently tend to favour elite interests over others (Adams 2004, Larson and Ribot 2007, Larson and Pulhin 2012). The public goods argument is a common justification for centralisation and can be seen as the result of reasonable concerns and debates about the best way to conserve forests, including maintaining timber supplies, in relation to the first two mandates mentioned above. The role of elite interests, however, involves more questionable motives. The challenge is to separate out the theoretical debates and scientific evidence regarding the former from the use of one particular (centralist) perspective as a justification for the latter (Larson et al. 2010b).

These contradictions have a number of implications with regard to forest tenure rights, since states (or state actors) may compete with communities over forest resources (see the discussion above on the criminalisation of customary practices historically). Even when they grant new forest rights to communities, states (or state actors) may try to maintain control. The state’s residual rights are not always a problem, but they are particularly problematic if abused by politicians or corrupt forestry officials.

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Competition with communities can be seen in the granting of logging rights in indigenous territories in Nicaragua, or in the granting of rights to convert forest to oil palm plantations in the customary areas claimed by communities in Indonesia (see below). In the former case, the government of Nicaragua regularly granted logging concessions in indigenous territories, even after the right of indigenous people to their traditional territories was established in the Constitution. A legal challenge to one such concession led to the landmark decision, in 2001, by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights to require the government to demarcate and title indigenous territories (Anaya and Grossman 2002). Even then, the government dragged its feet for another five years before issuing the first title (Larson and Mendoza-Lewis 2009).

The problem of ongoing state competition and control is manifested in a number of ways. For example, in the granting of rights to communities, important state actors have backed communities’ competitors, or failed to defend the exclusion right granted with the title. In Guarayos, Bolivia, the forestry authority renewed several private logging concessions on traditional lands that were claimed by the Guarayos people and were in the process of demarcation; this decision undermined confidence in the titling process, in the indigenous organisation representing the Guarayos people and in the government institutions involved (Cronkleton et al. 2009). In the Petén, Guatemala, the state initially backed a park expansion project that would have shut down several community forestry concessions (Monterroso and Barry 2009).

In other cases, state control is seen in the regulatory process, or through co-management arrangements that fail to give communities any substantial decision-making rights (Cronkleton et al. 2010). Researchers have demonstrated that decentralisation and devolution policies in India and the Philippines have resulted in the state obtaining greater control over communities rather than greater local decision-making (Edmunds and Wollenberg 2003). Regulations may be a way to protect forests or to obtain revenues, maintain bureaucratic power or line pockets. In Senegal, forestry


1 Scott, J. 1998 Seeing like a state: how certain schemes to improving the human condition have failed. Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA.2 Larson, A.M. and Ribot, J.C. 2007 The poverty of forestry policy: double standards on an uneven playing field. Sustainability Science 2: 189–204.3 Springate-Baginski, O., Sarin, M., Ghosh, S., Dasgupta, P., Bose, I., Banerjee, A., Sarap, K., Misra, P., Behera, S., Reddy, M.G. and Rao, P.T. 2009 Redressing ‘historical injustice’ through the Indian Forest Rights Act 2006. Discussion paper series no. 27. Institutions for Pro-Poor Growth (IPPG), Manchester, UK. www.ippg.org.uk/papers/dp27.pdf (24 August 2012).


personnel fail to implement the law establishing community rights to decisions over forest use permits (Ribot 2009). In Nepal, foresters establish their own requirements for community compliance, over and above the regulatory requirements (Paudel et al. 2008). Comparative research across a broad variety of types of forest tenure reforms demonstrates that management rights are often divided between the state and the community, with the state retaining substantial decision-making power over high-value and commercial resources (Cronkleton et al. 2010).

States can also play a very positive role in reform. Forest legislation and government programmes in Mexico were central to the development of subsidies, training and markets for what is now a substantial sector of community forestry enterprises (Bray et al. 2006). In India, important state actors have defended the rights of traditional communities under the Forest Rights Act and sought to overcome resistance from forestry officials (Reddy et al. 2011).

Competing interests in forests and forestlandCompetition for forests and forestland from outside interests threatens resource access for communities living in and near forests and suggests the importance of tenure rights and, in particular, tenure security for these populations. Competition with resident communities, of course, is multifaceted and is not new, but there are certain aspects of the current historical moment that raise new concerns or give new impetus to old ones. Competing interests include large-scale land acquisitions for a variety of uses (food security, oil palm, biofuels, carbon sequestration or REDD+ projects), as well as ongoing interests in forest conservation or in mining and petroleum; this section focuses only on the former, newer dynamic. Given the role of the state both in land and natural resource ownership and in negotiating foreign investment, the separation of these issues from the previous section is somewhat artificial.

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A UN Committee on World Food Security study on large-scale investments in agriculture found a variety of interests behind foreign land acquisitions: ‘multinational companies engaged in a variety of investments including biofuels and extractive industries, foreign governments seeking an assured food supply, commercial farmers expanding into neighbouring countries, and financial institutions wanting to broaden their asset portfolio’ (HLPE 2011: 9). About two-thirds of the estimated 50–80 million ha acquired so far are in sub-Saharan Africa, and overall these investments appear to occur with little legitimate community consultation; large areas under customary rights and without formal title are vulnerable to dispossession (HLPE 2011).

Other researchers have documented land acquisition without appropriate consultation. Schoneveld (2010) reports on a number of cases in Ghana and Zambia where negotiations were undertaken directly with the traditional authority without any warning or compensation to directly affected households. Cotula and Vermeulen (2009: 3) warn that international treaties protecting investment companies from breach of contract ‘tend to be much more effective than those available to local people for protecting their land rights, for instance under human rights treaties’.

Nevertheless, it is too simplistic to argue that all such investment is detrimental to, or against the will of, local people; Feintrenie and Levang (2011) find that many local people in Bungo, Sumatra, Indonesia, are in agreement with policies to convert forests to oil palm and rubber plantations, because they see them as economic opportunities. Other researchers in Indonesia, however, have found that, despite apparent voluntary participation, communities were often misinformed and companies did not uphold their end of agreements, leading to conflict (Colchester et al. 2006b). Where communities have only customary rights, they are highly vulnerable, because Indonesia’s Basic Agrarian Law and other regulations permit land


1 High Level Panel of Experts on Food Security and Nutrition (HLPE) 2011 Land tenure and international investments in agriculture. High Level Panel of Experts on Food Security and Nutrition of the Committee on World Food Security, Rome.2 Cotula, L. and S. Vermuelen 2009 ‘Land grabs’ in Africa: can the deals work for development? IIED Briefing. International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED), London.3 Cotula, L., Dyer, N. and Vermeulen, S. 2008 Fuelling exclusion? The biofuels boom and poor people’s access to land. International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED), London.


to be taken for a ‘public purpose’, including private corporate activities (Cotula et al. 2008).

The role of collective action Collective action is important to tenure rights in a number of ways and at a variety of scales. In particular, it is collective action that makes the management of the commons possible and, hence, for communities living in and near forests to put collective tenure rights into practice effectively. Collective action, such as through social movements, is likely to play an important role at community and broader scales in obtaining tenure rights and defending them from encroachment, as well as in demanding that states be responsible and accountable to communities. These and other kinds of organisations and federations promote training, financing and market participation.

Ostrom (1999) refers to collective action at the community scale as community self-governance and establishes a set of variables that enhance self-organisation. These include both biophysical variables and characteristics of the users. Later versions of this work expand to four clusters of variables determining success, for example in community forestry: biophysical, user-group, institutional arrangements (rules and

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accountability) and contextual factors (demographic, market, political) (Agrawal 2001, Dietz et al. 2003, Ostrom 2007, 2009).

Collective action may involve formal or informal institutions or organisations. For example, communities undertake a variety of activities to control their territory that do not involve formal statutes, such as establishing border patrols or forest monitors or guards. These may be paid community members or volunteer rotations. In other cases, there is no regular patrolling but rather community members report incursions to village authorities as they are discovered. When outsiders have been found logging or clearing land for settlement, villages have sometimes taken the law into their own hands to remove them (Larson and Mendoza-Lewis 2009).

Most community forestry projects, and some forest devolution schemes (as mentioned earlier in the subsection on formalising rights), require community groups to create formal institutions (Larson et al. 2008). This may undermine existing institutions or create competition or conflict within the community as a new group gains power or income through the control of resources. It may also improve community governance, if new institutions are more accountable or transparent.

Beyond the community scale, a number of networks related to community forestry have formed at national, regional and international levels, popularising community forestry discourses and drawing the interest of many international development agencies (Colchester et al. 2003). Although at times the discourse of reform is stronger than practice (Wollenberg et al. 2005), at least some emerging secondary-level organisations have become key players in shaping forest governance (Ojha et al. 2007, Cronkleton et al. 2008, Paudel et al. 2010). This ‘nesting of institutions’ helps to enforce rules and decisions made as part of community-level collective action (Banana, personal communication).

Two such organisations are the Federation of Community Forest Users, Nepal (FECOFUN) and the Association of Forest Communities of Petén, Guatemala (ACOFOP). These two organisations have been very important specifically in defending and expanding tenure rights for communities. For example, FECOFUN has opened up new forests to community forestry, prevented the state from imposing heavy taxes and influenced a number of other state decisions, including the introduction of the 2009 Community Forestry Guidelines; it has also promoted greater gender equity among its member organisations (Paudel et al. 2010). For its part, ACOFOP has played a central role in organising and defending the community forestry concessions in the Petén, including a three-year, US$100,000 legal battle to prevent the expansion of a protected area into the concessions; like FECOFUN, it has worked closely with government institutions to guarantee a decision-making role


for forest communities (Monterroso and Barry 2009, Paudel et al. 2010).

Organisations beyond the community scale can also be important in marketing. One example is the Brazil nut extractors cooperative COINACAPA in northern Bolivia, which in 2006 had 391 members from 40 northern Amazon communities. The cooperative collects Brazil nuts from its members, contracts a processing plant for shelling (rather than exporting them with shells) and then exports to Fair Trade and organic brokers. Producers usually receive about 50% of the original market price from the distribution of COINACAPA profits in a second payment that arrives several months after the first – a particularly important time for household economies, as cash income generated during the harvest is usually exhausted by then. COINACAPA also offers health insurance and study grants for its members’ children (Cronkleton et al. 2009).

In general, there appears to be a certain tension between the more political, lobbying and defence-of-rights needs of communities and members and the more technical, production and market-oriented needs. Political organisations often appear to be pulled into playing this latter role as well, yet the demands and skills required are quite different. At the same time, both may be needed. Taylor (2010) discusses this issue in relation to ACOFOP in the Petén, using the more abundant existing research on the experience of agrarian federations by Bebbington (1996) and others. As in these federations, he notes that ACOFOP’s initial political success lead to pressure ‘to assume functions previously exercised by states and NGOs’ such as technical support and the coordination of external assistance, in turn introducing new governance challenges regarding ‘new interests and constituencies, ways of participating, and conflicting organizational objectives’ (Taylor 201: 176).


1 CAPRi 2010 Resources, rights and cooperation: a sourcebook on property rights and collective action for sustainable development. International Food Policy Research Institute, Washington, DC.2 Paudel, N.S., Monterroso, I. and Cronkleton, P. 2012 Secondary level organisations and the democratisation of forest governance: case studies from Nepal and Guatemala. Conservation and Society 10: 124–135.3 Cronkleton, P., Taylor, P.L., Barry, D., Stone-Jovicich, S. and Schmink, M. 2008 Environmental governance and the emergence of forest-based social movements. CIFOR), Bogor, Indonesia.4 Ostrom, E. 1990 Governing the commons: the evolution of institutions for collective action. Cambridge University Press, New York.5 Vatn, A. 2007 Resource regimes and cooperation. Land Use Policy 24: 624–632.

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Inside communities: Issues of power and differentiationThe romantic vision of harmonious, cooperative rural communities has been thoroughly debunked (Agrawal and Gibson 1999), yet many people still tend to assume that some communities, particularly those under customary or traditional systems or authorities, are more just and harmonious than the average. One related issue is that it can be difficult to define exactly what a ‘community’ is.

If forests are often commons, under communal management or subject to collective action, then issues of leadership, representation and authority are particularly relevant, as is differentiation with regard to rights and benefit distribution. The term ‘authority’ is used in a number of different ways, particularly in the realms of policy and practice, which can make understanding it conceptually somewhat confusing. In particular, it is used to refer both to the abstract notion of power, such as the domain of powers held by a person or institution, and also to the person or institution holding that power (Fay 2008). The term is used in this section to discuss both meanings. According to Weber (1968), authority refers to power that is ‘legitimate’ (and the issue of legitimacy raises additional questions, of course, such as legitimate to whom and what constitutes legitimacy).

Authority is relevant to collective tenure rights in particular, because it affects how decisions are made within the collective, whose opinion or knowledge is taken into


account and how access to land and natural resources is determined in practice. That is, the collective is likely to have an internal governance structure as well as a person or group that represents it externally. The nature of these institutions (in common parlance, local authorities) and their domain of powers are fundamental to the distribution of access to land and forest resources and to the benefits they generate. Who makes decisions? Who makes and enforces rules? Who represents the collective externally?

A tenure or property right held by a collective may not in practice be held by all members of that collective. An exclusion right held by a group may be enforced by an authority that excludes some members of the group that should receive rights, while at the same time permitting access to external actors that should be excluded. A title may be granted to a group ‘representative’ who then manages the titled area as a private, personal domain. These problems raise issues of representation and accountability.

Ribot and Peluso (2003) argue that power and authority are central to issues of access to resources, and help explain why people are sometimes able to benefit from resources regardless of whether they have tenure rights. Conversely, power and authority explain why some people are unable to benefit from resources even when they do have rights; that is, ‘some people and institutions control resource access while others must maintain their access through those who have control’ (Ribot and Peluso 2003: 154).

The issue of authority becomes particularly apparent with regard to processes that seek to formalise tenure rights, as the process of formalisation has to designate a group of recipients and, usually, their legal representative. It might be assumed that granting rights to groups already living in and managing forests involves a simple process of formalising what already exists, but this has a number of problems. First, the existing authority may not be considered a legitimate, representative authority by the population. Second, even if this authority is accepted as legitimate


1 Ribot, J., Chhatre, A. and Lankina, T. (eds.) 2008 Special issue: choice and recognition in local democracy. Conservation and Society 6(1).2 Sikor, T. and Lund, C. (eds.) 2009 Special issue: the politics of possession: property, authority and access to natural resources. Development and Change 40(1).3 Larson, A.M. 2010 Making the ‘rules of the game’: constituting territory and authority in Nicaragua’s indigenous communities. Land Use Policy 27: 1143–1152.4 Pottinger, A.J. and Mwangi, E. (eds.) 2011 Special issue: forests and gender. International Forestry Review 13(2).

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for certain types of roles, it may not be considered legitimate for exercising this new domain of powers (Fay 2008). Third, the process of formalising an authority changes it (Ribot et al. 2008). Fourth, authority and governance institutions may not currently exist at the scale required for the recognition of rights, such as in many indigenous territories in Latin America that may have had such structures previously only at the community scale (Stocks 2005, Larson et al. 2010a).

Research suggests that the issue of representation can be highly contentious. Elite capture is a common problem in many processes of reform, as powerful community leaders may seek to use such opportunities to their advantage (see, for example, Ribot 2004, Ntsebeza 2005, Mwangi 2007, Ribot et al. 2008, Cousins 2011). Community elders may resist reform (Banana, personal communication). In several African countries, unelected chiefs and other leaders have received new powers through decentralisation policies as agents for local populations but without representing or being accountable to them (for example, see Ribot (2004) for a synthesis of 25 case studies). In some cases, governments require those receiving rights to form new organisations, such as incorporated entities that create formal structures of accountability and legal recourse. However, such entities may be foreign to the way in which people are used to operating and may impose inappropriate and unworkable legal and cultural norms.


Even in the absence of unaccountable authorities and elite capture, rights and benefit distribution within communities may not be equitable. Women, poorer community members, recent immigrants, certain ethnic groups, seasonal users or nomadic peoples may use forest resources in different ways and have different – and often lesser – rights and decision-making power over resources and benefits. Although all of these categories are relevant, this section only (briefly) addresses the issue of gender, which cross-cuts the others.

In general, women’s rights to land are not as straightforward as men’s. Whether land is individual or collective, women may not be permitted to control their own plots, to be included on land titles or to inherit land. The specific arrangements of their relationship to men (e.g. husbands, partners, fathers, brothers) and their social position (e.g. single, married, widowed) form a complex matrix of factors that often affect women’s right to land and forest and, hence, their dependence on men for their livelihoods. Lastarria-Cornhiel (2011) studies women’s rights to communal lands in Latin American indigenous communities in Bolivia and Guatemala and finds that even where the law guarantees women’s rights, in local practice, women are forced to obtain access to land and natural resources through husbands and sons. Cousins (2011) provides a fascinating analysis of two traditional communities in South Africa that respond very differently to women’s demand for land rights in a changing social context of more single mothers and fewer formal marriages. In Kenya, Harrington and Chopra (2010) find that formal, informal and hybrid systems are equally

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inadequate for guaranteeing land access for women.

Differentiation in access, use and decisions regarding land and forests is important for food security, equity and sustainability (Mai et al. 2011). The design of appropriate policies and interventions, and avoiding unwanted outcomes, requires attention in research to ‘people in nested and overlapping constituencies that reflect the multiple roles, identities and interests of men and women across class, location, occupation and other points of difference and affinity’ (Rocheleau and Edmunds 1997: 1368). For more on the study of gender and forests, see [CIFOR manual under preparation].

Alternative – or complementary – approaches The concept of tenure or property rights does not address all aspects of rights and practice that affect forest access and control for forest-based communities. This section briefly introduces the access approach, on the one hand, and ‘rights-based approaches’, on the other.

First, from the perspective of access theorists, tenure rights alone are only part of the story, as access to resources depends on power relations and processes that shape the exercise of rights in practice. In fact, access to and control over resources may have nothing to do with rights at all, for example where it results from resource theft, bribery or the power to force someone off their land (Ribot and Peluso 2003).

These theorists argue that the ‘ability to benefit’, rather than ‘rights’, should be the focus of inquiry; they argue that this concept is broader and encompasses the idea of having a right to something (Ribot and Peluso 2003). That is, rights are only one mode through which power is exercised to obtain resource access. In addition, even if someone owns a forest plot, she or he may not be able to benefit from it because of lack of access to the permits to cut the wood or to the market to sell it. Research on ‘the ability to benefit’ could provide a different or complementary set of insights into forest livelihoods (see Sikor and Lund 2009). At a minimum, it is important to


1 Ribot, J. and Peluso, N. 2003 A theory of access. Rural Sociology 68: 153–181.2 Colchester, M. 2008 Beyond tenure: rights-based approaches to peoples and forests: some lessons from the Forest Peoples Programme. Rights and Resources Initiative: Washington, DC.3 Sikor, T. and Lund, C. 2009 Access and property: a question of power and authority. Development and Change 40: 1–22. [Introduction to Special Issue; see also Special Issue articles]


recognise that the study of rights alone is of limited value without studying practice as well.

Second, the shift towards ‘rights-based approaches’ in development (see, for example, Hickey and Mitlin 2009) and, more recently, conservation demonstrates a concern for rights beyond property alone. Rights-based approaches, though still defined on the ground (e.g. Campese et al. 2009), emphasise the importance of grounding practice in human rights, including international norms and laws; they are aimed at empowering people to make claims on government and demand accountability (Nyamu-Musembi and Cornwall 2004). Whether or not this approach improves development practice, rights, forest condition or livelihoods is a legitimate subject for future research.

The approach, at least in theory, would appear to coincide with the broader demands being made by certain populations, such as Latin American indigenous peoples. These groups consider land rights to be embedded in broader demands for human and civil rights as well as a different historical conception of ‘property’ (Sieder 2002, Eckstein and Wickham-Crowley 2003), which is intimately tied to the maintenance of cultural systems. In this regard, other important rights-related policies such as the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) or the principle of Free, Prior and Informed Consent (FPIC) may be directly relevant to property rights processes in a particular context. These policies are central to

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protecting rights regarding access to resources but have emerged from historically based demands that go far beyond this. Other rights, such as the right to vote, to organise or to participate in local government, may make the exercise of tenure rights possible. The lack of such rights, or of basic civil or human rights, among one group of actors may be important for understanding why another group of actors obtains access and control over resources even without property rights.

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Anne M

. Larson

Center for International Forestry ResearchCIFOR advances human wellbeing, environmental conservation and equity by conducting research to inform policies and practices that affect forests in developing countries. CIFOR is a CGIAR Consortium Research Center. CIFOR’s headquarters are in Bogor, Indonesia and it also has offices in Asia, Africa and South America.

Tenure rights and access to forests: A training m

anual for research

cifor.org blog.cifor.org

Part I of this guide has been created with the purpose of summarizing the most important aspects of forest tenure rights and resource access, because of the relevance of these issues to research on forests, as well as providing guidance on the selection of methods and tools for obtaining appropriate tenure information in research.

Part II, Methods and Tools, which will be available on CIFOR’s web site, provides a collection of methods and tools with a discussion of the potential and limitations of each.

This research was carried out by CIFOR as part of the CGIAR Research Programme, ‘Forests, Trees and Agroforestry: Livelihoods, Landscapes and Governance’. The Programme aims to enhance management and use of forests, agroforestry and tree genetic resources across the landscape from forests to farms. The Center for International Forestry Research leads the collaborative Programme in partnership with Bioversity International, the International Center for Tropical Agriculture and the World Agroforestry Centre.

Documents

Tenure rights and access to forestsLand-grabbing could be driven by interests ranging from agriculture to minerals, carbon rights, biofuels or conservation, requiring attention to