jp8589 WRI.qxd - World Resources Institute

CHAPTER 4
FOUR STEPS TO ENVIRONMENTAL INCOME
■ Exclusion of women. Women make up the majority of the
world’s agricultural producers, but they are usually the last to
be included in land and tenure reform efforts. Traditionally,
women in Africa and other parts of the developing world have
only had access to land tenure through their husbands, fathers,
or other male relatives. Registration of land in the name of
male relatives precludes women from obtaining property rights
at a time when women’s access to land for cultivation is becoming
increasingly important for AIDS widows and other female
heads of households (Carter 2003:49).
■ Inadequate procedures for documenting communal
rights. The lack of appropriate procedures for expeditious,
cost-effective documentation of untitled communal property
rights can compromise the effectiveness of tenure reform.
For instance, the government of Bolivia enacted legislation
recognizing indigenous land rights in 1996; because of
complicated and costly documentation procedures, however,
by 1999 only 10 percent of eligible territories had received
titles (White and Martin 2002:16).
■ Conditionality and other constraints to land markets.
Many new tenure laws do nothing to remove constraints and
limitations that have long hampered land markets in developing
countries. For example, none of the recent spate of African
tenure legislation removes long-standing requirements to
occupy and use agricultural land in order to maintain tenure
(Alden Wily and Mbaya 2001:14 ). Agricultural use may not
always be the best use of ecosystems, either economically or
ecologically. For example, conversion to wildlife habitat may be
a better use of some lands with high tourist potential, or
conversion to other commercial purposes. Flexibility in land
use may increase the value of the land assets of the poor, while
conditions on use reduce the economic potential of the land.
Poor-Friendly Decentralization: Community-
Based Natural Resource Management
Improving the tenure security of the poor and their ability to
exercise property rights is only one step in the legal, economic,
and political empowerment of poor families. A second important
step is devolving management authority over ecosystems to
local institutions that are more accessible to the poor.
As detailed in Chapter 3, decentralization that actually
works for the poor is more the exception than the rule. It
requires, at a minimum, that local institutions—whether they be
official government institutions like village councils or informal
institutions such as user groups, cooperatives, or watershed
committees—are formed on democratic principles of representation,
meaning that they are accountable to their low-income
constituents. But this alone is not usually enough to overcome the
structural bias against the poor in local institutions. Special
efforts to include the poor are generally required. These can
range from reserving gender-based or income-based slots in local
institutions to insure participation; arranging for special outreach
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