the role of property rights in natural resource management, good ...

positioned themselves to prepare for formalization of their property claims vis-à-vis competing groups. Theinitiative has stalled several times in the face of the complex technological, financial and other resourcerequirements to fully implement a system to formalize customary rights. At the same time conflicts surfacedbased on the multiple claims inherent in most customary systems. While potentially laudable undertaking, itcould also be argued that Niger’s Rural Code process is both overly ambitious and somewhat misguided inattempting a wholesale formalization multiple, overlapping and diverse property claims. That initiative runsthe risk of petrifying the existing (or manipulated) pattern of land and resource rights by perhaps inadvertently,driving up the transactions costs of adaptation. 16 If the only way to modify existing allocations of rights in the face ofchanging economic, political and sociological circumstances (e.g., the impact of the HIV/AIDS pandemic) isto redo the Rural Code, then this initiative will very likely reduce flexibility in land and natural resource tenurearrangements that might arguably be characterized as a sine qua non of survival in a very harsh desert-edgeenvironment. These aspects are both complex and non-trivial. Program designers are advised to bear these inmind because failure to do so can wreak havoc with institutional arrangements that have helped generationsof people survive in bleak, apparently impoverished environments across the globe.In contrast to Niger’s initiative to produce a comprehensive Rural Code, a project supported effort in Guineaintroduced the concept and tool of written tenure contracts as a first step toward formalization of existing rightsbetween landowners and land borrowers. 17 In a completely voluntary program, introduction of tenurecontracts was proposed on the assumption that it was in the interest of both borrower and owner to defineand formalize a lending period and any other conditions pertaining to the land loan. Often a landownerlacked the labor to work a piece of land but hesitated to run the risk of losing historical ownership claims bylending parcels to those who could mobilize the required labor. The land borrower, on the other hand, wasusually borrowing for an undefined period, and therefore could lose access following any given growingseason. This practice discouraged investments in land and management efforts that would promote andconsolidate sustainable use practices. Project-supported leases were designed to permit any time periodmutually agreed upon by owner and borrower. The first years following introduction of the leases formalizedtime periods of as little as five years, or in a few cases, one year. But each year of the project, as participantsbecame used to the arrangement, the time periods lengthened, and in some cases were specified for as long as99 years. A few pieces of land were even transferred in perpetuity. Note that the Guinea flexible contractingexperience, by contrast with the Niger Rural Code initiative, encouraged experimentation. Given the minimaltransactions costs involved in adapting leases to incorporate longer terms as both lenders and borrowersgained familiarity with and confidence in this contractual arrangement, both sets of parties adapted leases inan appropriate manner to lengthen the period of contractual commitment. This outcome is highlyappropriate: land borrowers now have the confidence to make productivity maintaining or enhancinginvestments in leased parcels because they have, within a flexible leasing structure, the investment securityengendered by a negotiated and contractually fixed period of control over the leased parcel. Owners, on theother side of the arrangement, establish written proof of title and achieve greater assurance that borrowerswill not run down but rather improve leased parcels because they have compelling incentives to do so. These resultswill need evaluation in a decade; at the moment they suggest that appropriately flexible enabling frameworksproduce positive results for the labor-poor landowners, the landless but labor-rich, and the biophysical16France during the inter-war period employed ethnographers and anthropologists to gather data on and describe land and natural resourcetenure arrangements throughout its West African colonies. Many colonial administrators seized on those studies as ways to cut throughthe complexity of customary systems without realizing the damage they were doing to customary tenure systems by stamping outflexibility in the name of “certainty.”17The Expanded Natural Resources Management Activity (ENRMA) was implemented from September 1999 to September 2005. ENRMAwas financed by USAID and implemented by the Government of Guinea and Winrock International. The land tenure contract componentof the ENRMA built on earlier research conducted by the Land Tenure Center, University of Wisconsin-Madison.24 ROLE OF PROPERTY RIGHTS IN NRM: GOOD GOVERNANCE AND EMPOWERMENT OF THE RURAL POOR