Forests Sourcebook - HCV Resource Network

NOTE 1.4
Property and Access Rights
In many countries, most of the forest estate remains
publicly owned and managed, despite legitimate local
claims to the forests, extensive occupation by agrarian
people, and the limited ability of governments to protect
these vast resources. Legal frameworks and rural land-use
policies often discourage or deny local people’s rights to
own, use, and trade their forest products and services. A
current dilemma is the complementarity between these
frameworks and policies and environmental laws and regulations,
which may evolve with limited attention to tenure
and rights implications.
Development projects promoting agriculture expansion,
large-scale irrigation, and industrial (and mining) development
have often impinged on forest areas and forest inhabitants.
Often, indigenous and forest-dependent communities
do not directly benefit from these activities. Similarly,
forestry projects that deal with industrial and logging concessions,
government-controlled logging quotas, protected
area enlargements, and plantation developments can, if not
appropriately designed and planned, affect tenure and customary
rights of indigenous and other forest communities.
Most of these forestry projects affect traditional forest users,
those with ancestral forest rights, shifting cultivators, and
NTFP gatherers (such as in Cambodia, Lao PDR, and Vietnam).
Operationally, it is difficult to avoid these undesirable
impacts in absence of clarity on tenure and property rights
(see note 1.3, Indigenous Peoples and Forests).
Emerging payment schemes and markets for ecosystem
services, such as water flow and biodiversity conservation,
present both similar and special sets of issues for forest
tenure and property rights. Unless done properly, poor people
are less likely to participate in these markets because of
their inability to assume risk, the lack of organization to create
economies of scale, limited land and investment capital,
and often unclear property and use rights. These emerging
markets can be a means for government and local communities
to enhance forest rights in a pilot watershed credits or
a carbon credits scheme and provide complementary technical
support, as well as providing additional returns to
poor producers managing forests on the margin. If not done
sensitively, they can, however, also set dangerous precedents
by introducing new uncertainties—deeming shifting cultivation
or other traditional practices unacceptable, establishing
long-term contracts in regions where forest tenure is
contested, extinguishing traditional use and access, and raising
the price of forests beyond the reach of local people.
Clearly defined rights are essential if the forestdependent
poor are to improve their income and wellbeing.
If individuals, communities, and businesses are to
invest in forest resources, take responsibility for their conservation,
and participate regularly and openly in the marketplace,
they need to be confident of their property rights.
Growing evidence from around the world demonstrates
that recognizing local rights and improving local governance
is politically feasible. It is also a cost-effective strategy
for rural poverty alleviation.
Emerging trends show that more countries are now
actively engaged in reforming their forest land and management
practices. Many communities and Indigenous Peoples
are asserting their rights to manage their forests, and some
governments are introducing substantive changes to forest
tenure and to policies and rules governing markets, and linking
these to agrarian and related sector policies. The forest
sector is now undergoing important reforms, arguably the
most important set of policy and market shifts since the end
of the colonial era, and these present historic opportunities
for, and sometimes threats to, the well-being—livelihoods,
rights, freedom and choices, and culture—of the 1.6 billion
poor people who live in and around forests. These reforms
affect the way in which forest people manage and conserve
forests and affect the provisioning of forest environmental
goods and services that benefit society as a whole.
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