Legal empowerment for local resource control

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2.3.2. Para-legal tools
The fact that legal tools for securing local resource rights are enshrined in
the legal system does not necessarily mean that local resource users are in a
position to use them and benefit from them. In much of rural Africa, use of
the state legal system is constrained by a range of different factors – from
lack of resources to cultural issues. Among these factors, economic,
geographic, linguistic and other constraints on access to courts as well as
lack of legal awareness tend to be recurrent problems. While laws are
usually published in the official gazette, few people outside legal circles
have access to this. Illiteracy, language barriers (as many people in rural
areas may not speak the official language in which laws and gazettes are
written) and lack of access to legal assistance constrain the extent to which
rural populations know the law and can make it work for them. To be
effective, legal tools must be accompanied by efforts to improve legal
literacy, and access to the legal system. They also require building local
confidence in the law – in many contexts, marginalised groups do not trust
the legal system due to the widespread manipulation that it has historically
been subjected to by the more powerful.
In many parts of Africa, a growing number of civil society organisations,
development agencies and public interest law firms (collectively referred to
here as “legal services organisations”) have developed experience with ways
of tackling these issues. For instance, the implementation of Mozambique’s
Land Act (particularly its community registration programme) owes much to
the support that NGOs have provided to “local communities” (see below,
section 3.1). Similarly, litigation in the areas of land takings and
environmental pollution (see below, section 3.3) as well as in the area of
human rights (e.g. SERAC v. Nigeria; see above, chapter 2.2.1) owes much to
the legal assistance provided by legal services organisations.
In providing this support, legal services organisations have developed a
range of approaches and support materials for providing training, legal
assistance, advocacy and other services. These range from innovative
approaches to legal literacy training; to use of rural radios to raise legal
awareness; to participatory methodologies to identify, demarcate and
register collective land rights; to approaches for supporting local resource
users in their negotiations with government officials and foreign investors;
to a range of tools for helping local resource users bring a case against the