Legal empowerment for local resource control

BOX 5. LOCAL CONVENTIONS
Where stronger/broader resource rights are vested with local resource users, there
is a need to develop tools that assist them in exercising their resource
management responsibilities. The experience with “local conventions” for natural
resource management, developed in the Sahel over the past few years, provides
an example of this.
Local conventions are a tool for the decentralised management of natural
resources. They are sets of rules and institutions negotiated and agreed by local
resource users with a view to regulating resource access and use. They have been
developed in several Sahelian countries, including Senegal, and can help local
governments exercise their natural resource management responsibilities in an
inclusive and participatory way. In agro-pastoral contexts, local conventions may
be particularly valuable in reconciling the competing resource interests of herders,
farmers and agro-pastoralists, for instance in regulating issues like pastoral
mobility and access to water points, dry-season pastures and post-harvest fields.
In many cases, development agencies facilitate the process through which the
resource users are identified, trained, supported in the establishment and
consolidation of community based organisations, and accompanied in the
negotiation, drafting and implementation of the convention.
In some cases, the convention is formalised through local government bylaws.
Questions about the legal status of these conventions nonetheless remain,
particularly where resource ownership and management rights are held, in whole
or in part, by the state rather than by local authorities (Djiré, 2004). This unclear
legal status may undermine the effectiveness of local conventions, particularly
when powerful outsiders such as foreign investors enter the local arena.
With specific regard to decentralisation, a key issue affecting the degree of local
resource control is the relationship between local government bodies and the
representative of the central state at the local level (“deconcentrated”
authorities, such as the préfet or sous-préfet in Francophone Africa). Common
requirements that the acts of local government bodies be approved by
deconcentrated authorities before they become effective tend to curtail the
decision-making power of local governments. In Senegal, on the other hand,
legislation requires the sous-préfet to approve only those local government acts
falling within specified areas (which include budget and land matters); and
provides that lack of reaction within a month entails tacit approval (Decree 96-
228 of 1996). This mechanism constitutes a significant shift of power from the
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