Highlights from the Global Comparative Study on Tenure Reform (GCS Tenure)

When land and forest tenure laws are clear and implemented, forest communities tend to manage their natural resources sustainably, often drawing from generations of local knowledge. But in many countries, uncertain tenure and overlapping rights leads to conflict and forest and land degradation, disproportionately affecting women, poor people and ethnic minorities.

CIFOR aims to equip policy makers, practitioners and communities with a deeper understanding of the key drivers, challenges and future consequences of policy options in countries at various stages of tenure reform.

Since 2014, CIFOR has worked with partners and communities across the tropics to document people’s experience of forest tenure reform. In 2018, CIFOR teamed up with the World Resources Institute for a comprehensive review the scramble for land rights in 15 countries across Africa, Asia and Latin America. The report details how communities and companies formalize land rights, contrasting the barriers they face with the relative short-cuts afforded to private companies for land, and shines a light on transparent pathways to a more even playing field.

At the 2018 World Bank Conference on Land and Poverty in Washington DC, scientists from the GCS Tenure team presented preliminary findings on conflict in collective land and forest formalization in Indonesia, Nepal, Peru and Uganda. The two project coordinators were among 30 people invited to attend the Rights and Resources Initiative (RRI) Strategy Meeting on Gender Justice in Community Lands and Forests in Washington DC to prioritize themes to guide RRI’s five year gender strategy. And at a community-focused plenary session at the Global Landscape Forum in Nairobi, Kenya, participants from Uganda’s GCS Tenure project showed that secure tenure and gender equity are critical success factors for forest landscape restoration.

Asia

Based on research in Indonesia’s Lampung province on the island of Sumatra – a leader on social forestry in the country – CIFOR published a guidebook in the Indonesian language to help communities get a better grasp of the inner-workings of social forestry in their own context. Designed as a reference for government officials and community assistants in the field, the guide offers explanations in simple terms of the legal logistics to local community forest management.

Forests News produced a two-part video series on coffee and sap collection in the province to illustrate some of the benefits of these social forestry schemes.

In Maluku province, West Seram, the team is working with communities who want their customary land rights recognized, along with the right to manage them according to ancient traditions. Together, they have identified key constraints to bringing about tenure reform, including the failure to recognize such customary rights, coordination challenges, changes of policy and regulation, lack of information for spatial planning.

Forests News documented their stories in a three-part video series and a ‘postcard from the field’.

Africa

A two-day workshop in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of the Congo organized by CIFOR and partners targeted a window of opportunity to influence a new forest tenure reform process involving changes to the country’s 2002 Forest Code.

Forests News detailed the discussions in a two-piece series on land tenure in the DRC.

In Uganda – where despite 15 years of land tenure reforms, tenure insecurity is still common, especially among women – the GCS Tenure team continued to analyze results from a 2017 national-level week-long participatory workshop on tenure reform in Kampala. Legislators attending a policy roundtable organized by GCS Tenure requested a policy briefing summarizing findings for Parliament to discuss more broadly. The team also held a forum on women’s forest tenure security, as well as training sessions to raise awareness of collective forest tenure rights – including the rights of women and marginalized groups – among lower local government officials and grassroots civil society organizations.

Forests News explored the role politics play in the country’s forest tenure reform efforts.

In Kenya, PPAs were conducted in three counties to capture the diversity of tenure regimes, ecosystem types and drivers of degradation, focusing on securing tenure rights in some sites and on restoring degraded landscapes in others.

Latin America

In Latin America, CIFOR has closely followed Peru’s approach to formalizing land rights, publishing a history of collective titling (also in Spanish) and several infobriefs:

• Progress in formalizing “native community” rights in the Peruvian Amazon (2014-2018) (also in Spanish)
• Challenges in formalizing the rights of native communities in Peru (also in Spanish)
• The impact of formalizing rights to land and forest: Indigenous community perspectives in Madre de Dios and Loreto (also in Spanish)

To raise awareness of the challenges around land and tenure facing indigenous communities in Peru, the GCS Tenure team produced a video and several radio programs (both in Spanish).

A three-day congress on land and tenure security organized by the Faculty of Forestry Sciences of the National Agrarian University La Molina brought government, academics, NGOs and community leaders to Lima, Peru to discuss advances in tenure reform. Over 700 people joined training sessions via livestream on conflict in Peru and Colombia, tenure insecurity, and voluntary guidelines on responsible governance, and the videos have been produced for web trainings.

The team has also documented the background and current status of collective land tenure in Colombia, along with data and trends, and why the country’s peace agreement may depend on getting collective land tenure right.

More GCS Tenure publications

After tenure reform, what next?

With support from the CGIAR Research Program on Policies, Institutions, and Markets (PIM), CIFOR and partners are investigating how communities that have gained rights to their land are managing their forest resources and developing their livelihoods.

REDD+, indigenous peoples and migration

Other tenure-related highlights include a new global study revealing that about 40% of protected and ecologically-intact landscapes are actually under indigenous peoples’ custodianship, an occasional paper detailing the missing links in the forest-migration nexus, and results from a study that took stock of five countries’ efforts to create a tenure foundation for REDD+ (reducing greenhouse gas emissions from deforestation and forest degradation).

Tenure and rights research … over the years

CIFOR scientists have been making the connections between poverty, land rights, conservation and livelihoods since the earliest research projects.