PROTEC TING C O M M U N ITY LA N DS A N D RE SO U RCE S
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Marrucua The community of Marrucua benefited from becoming part of a community land delimitation project promoted by the Morrumbene District Government. Although Marrucua had already made some advances on its own before the District stepped in to undertake delimitation exercises, the District’s process mandated that the work begin again from the start. Positively, the community reported that the second time around, the process went smoothly as a result of community leaders’ knowledge gained from reading the manuals and guides distributed by CTV. A community leader in Marrucua explained: “We had to start the process over, but as we had already led some activities such as participatory mapping and initiated the boundary harmonization work [on our own], [beginning again with the district] was not complicated for us, because we had already used the material given to us by CTV.”
Jogo The community of Jogo did not make any progress, largely due to its Regulo, who insisted that rather than working at the level of the povoado he wanted all three povoados within his domain to work together to seek delimitation at the level of the regulado. However, this Regulo did not call the leaders or the people from the three povoados to meet, and as a result the process stalled and was eventually abandoned. Previously, the project included plans to work with only one of the three povoados, Matuwi, but the Regulo’s insistence that any land delimitation efforts within his authority be combined rendered the process more unwieldy because it involved three communities, three sets of leaders and a much larger area of land. As one of those leaders explained: It was not easy to unite the people of all three communities, because we only meet once a month together as a group… and in this monthly meeting we always have many problems and issues to resolve, and there was no time left to complete the project activities. [We also faced] low participation from community members of the three communities, and sometimes we even lacked the participation of the leaders of the povoados. Jogo also did not have the positive influence of any neighboring communities involved in the project and therefore failed to feel the momentum of other communities’ experiences. Jogo’s experience demonstrates that performing this work at the level of regulado may be more difficult than performing the work at the povoado level, where the population is smaller and the land to be delimited is well known to all.