Legal empowerment for local resource control

(section 1 of the Land Act and section 18 of the Village Land Act 1999).
Recognition of full ownership rights to local resource users is rare also where
rights are vested with private legal entities. In Mozambique, the Land Act 1997
upholds the constitutional principle that ownership of land and natural
resources, both surface and subsoil, is vested in the State (articles 98 and 109 of
the Constitution). “Local communities” are therefore granted long-term use
rights over the lands they collectively hold, whether on the basis of customary
law or of long occupation (articles 12-13 of the Land Act 1997).
In Cameroon, community forestry involves the transfer of management rights
over a forest area on the basis of a convention between the “village
community” and the government administration. While forest products belong
to the village community, ownership of the trees and of the land usually
remains with the state – unless the trees are planted by local resource users on
legally registered land (article 37 of the Forest Act 1994).
On the other hand, land legislation in Ghana and Cameroon does recognise
private ownership rights (along with other types of resource rights). In
Cameroon, however, the acquisition of private ownership is constrained by the
long, costly and cumbersome land registration procedure, which is required as
a precondition for acquiring ownership rights.
It is worth nothing that, outside the African context, there are examples of
legislation recognising collective ownership rights to local users. In the
Philippines, for instance, the Indigenous Peoples’ Rights Act 1997 provides for the
recognition, demarcation and titling of indigenous peoples’ “ancestral domains”.
Differently to Mozambique’s community land registration experience, local
communities may be granted full ownership rights over their land.
It must be noted that the debate on establishing private ownership rights in
Africa is longstanding, complex and often polarised between opposed
ideological positions – particularly those emphasising the alleged economic
benefits of creating individual land ownership rights as a key step to promoting
capitalistic development (e.g. de Soto, 2000), and those stressing the specificity
of land relations in rural Africa, the safety net function of (often idealised)
“customary” tenure systems and the alleged extraneity of full ownership rights
in such customary systems.
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