Strategies for Strengthening Community Property Rights over Forests: Lessons and Opportunities for Practitioners

An historic transition in global forest tenure is currently underway. After years of government resistance, community claims to forest ownership are finally gaining momentum and acknowledgement. Many governments are beginning to recognize the ownership claims of indigenous communities and others, and to grant access to lands usurped by colonial powers hundreds of years ago. Now that there is growing opportunity to advance the community rights and forest tenure reform agendas, it is necessary to identify the key strategies for strengthening community tenure. It is equally important to capture and disseminate lessons for practitioners, donors, forward-looking governments and the communities themselves. In some countries this process of recognizing community rights is well advanced. In Bolivia, the Philippines, Colombia and Canada, for example, court decisions, presidential edicts, and new legislation have in fact granted some communities very strong managerial rights over forests, along with use of these lands. In some cases the rights are strong enough to constitute full, private ownership. On the other hand, in Russia and many countries in Southeast Asia and Africa, the transition towards recognizing and respecting community rights has just begun. And in many countries that have passed new legislation, cumbersome regulations, lack of enforcement and continued policy bias against community property continue to be major barriers. In places where it is emerging, respect for community property comes in response to decolonization as maturing nation states enter the global economy and devolve control to a more local level. In this process of devolution, local groups, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and their supporters have been key to the transition. Their efforts have often been waged in direct confrontation with governments. Nations and advocates of sound forest management are recognizing that secure property rights are fundamental to achieve forest conservation, social justice and poverty alleviation. It is increasingly evident that in order to achieve tenure security, substantial legal reform will be necessary. Local groups, NGOs and their supporters have employed a wide variety of strategies to advance community rights and tenure reform agendas, and these strategies in large part reflect the range of social and political conditions in each country. Given that these groups have been relatively few in number, somewhat isolated within their own country contexts and in possession of limited resources, the lessons learned from them have not been carefully examined or widely shared. Most literature has focused on the role of international NGOs or donors, without enough …