What rights? by Chris Lang

ENDNOTES

Rights and Resources Initiative (RRI). 2008. Seeing people through the trees. Washington, DC: Rights and Resources Initiative.

White, Andy and Alejandra Martin. 2002. Who owns the world’s forests? Washington, DC: Forest Trends.

White and Martin 2002:6

Sunderlin, William D., Jeffrey Hatcher, and Megan Liddle. 2008. From Exclusion to Ownership? Challenges and opportunities in advancing forest tenure reform. Washington DC: Rights and Resources Initiative (RRI) http://www.rightsandresources.org/documents/files/doc_736. pdf; RRI/ITTO. 2009. Tropical Forest Tenure Assessment: Trends, Challenges and Opportunities. Co-published by: Rights and Resources Initiative and International Tropical Timber Organization.

EU FLEGT Facility and RECOFTC, Forest Tenure in Asia: Status and Trends. Kuala Lumpur. 2011.

See, for example: Asian Development Bank. 2009. Land and cultural survival: the communal land rights of Indigenous Peoples in Asia. Mandaluyong City, Philippines: Asia Development Bank. p139–211.http://www.adb.org/documents/Books/Land-Cultural-Survival/ land-cultural-survival.pdf; Bulan, Ramy. Undated. Recent developments on forests and land tenure issues in Malaysia. Kuala Lumpur: Centre for Indigenous Malaysian Studies, University of Malaya; Brown, David. 2008. Prospects for community forestry in Liberia: implementing the national forest policy. Monrovia, Liberia: Sustainable Development Institute. www.odi.org.uk/resources/download/4650. pdf; Alden Wily, Liz. 2011. Rights to Resources in Crisis: Reviewing the Fate of Customary Tenure in Africa. Washington DC: Rights and Resources Initiative (RRI).

The developing world is defined as countries classified as low-income, lower-middle-income and upper-middle-income countries by the World Bank. The total forest area of the 27 countries presented here is 1.66 billion hectares, while the total forest area for developing countries is 2.25 billion hectares (Russia is excluded from these calculations because its coverage of forest area has statistically distorting effects). FAO. 2011. Global forest resources assessment 2010. FAO Forestry Paper 163. Rome: FAO.

REDD+ encourages developing countries to contribute to climate-change mitigation in the forest sector through the following activities: reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation; conservation of forest carbon stocks; the sustainable management of forests; and the enhancement of forest carbon stocks.

“Establishing … systems of conservation units for their environmental, social and spiritual functions and … the traditional forest habitats of indigenous people, forest dwellers and local communities”[Agenda 21 Chapter 11.13b]; “Involvement of indigenous people and their communities at the national and local levels in resource management and conservation strategies” [Agenda 21 Chapter 26.3]; “National forest policies should recognize and duly support the identity, culture, and the rights of indigenous people, their communities and other communities and forest dwellers. Appropriate conditions should be promoted … through, inter alia, land tenure arrangements … [Forest Principles (non-legally binding), Principle 5a].

Blomley, Tom et al., 2008. “Seeing Wood for the Trees: an assessment of the impact of participatory forest management on forest condition in Tanzania. “Oryx. 42(3): 380–391.; Ellis, Edward A., and Luciana Porter-Bolland. 2008. “Is community-based forest management more effective than protected areas?: A comparison of land use/land cover change in two neighboring study areas of the Central Yucatan Peninsula, Mexico.” Forest Ecology and Management. 256(11): 1971-1983. Chhartre, Ashwini and Arun Agarwal. 2009. “Trade-offs and synergies between carbon storage and livelihood benefits from forest commons.” PNAS. ; Ojha, Hemant, Persha, Lauren and Ashwini Chhartre. 2009. Community Forestry in Nepal: A Policy Innovation for Local Livelihoods. Washington DC: International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI).; Nelson, Andrew and Kenneth M. Chomitz.2011. “Effectiveness of strict vs. multiple use protected areas in reducing tropical forest fires.” PLoS ONE. 6(8): e22722.; Porter-Bolland, Luciana et al. 2011. “Community managed forests and forest protected areas: An assessment of their conservation effectiveness across the tropics.” Forest Ecology and Management.

Common-pool resources managed through systems of “common property” are often confused with “open access” resources in which there are no management mechanisms to allocate or regulate access or withdrawal rights. In contrast, common-pool resources, such as forests, are often managed and regulated through complex sets of social and political interactions. The illusion of “open access” is created when enforcement mechanisms fail and more powerful entities take advantage of local rights-holders’ relative inability to exclude.

The concept of the ‘bundle of rights’ is a tool in that it helps to unpack the complex power relations and land uses found on a particular landscape. Individuals and groups may hold different sets of rights in the resources within a particular system. These distinct sets of rights are known as a tenure (Bruce 1989). A tenure system is therefore the framework that facilitates the allocation of rights, enforces rules and manages relations amongst different rights-holders and interactions with other systems. Multiple typologies have been proposed to categorize the various rights found within the bundle, however Schlager and Ostrom’s seminal 1992 paper played a major role in popularizing the basic typology used in this study. Bruce, John W. 1989. Community forestry rapid appraisal of tree and land tenure. Community Forestry Note 5. Rome: Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO); For typology, see: Schlager, Edella, and Elinor Ostrom. 1992. “Property-rights regimes and natural resources: A conceptual analysis”. Land Economics. 68 (3): 249–62 and Barry, Deborah and Ruth Meinzen-Dick, 2008. “The Invisible Map: Community tenure rights.” Food Policy. 1-27.

The distinction between revoking and extinguishing a right is a nuanced one. Extinguishing suggests that the state can arbitrarily eliminate or attenuate a community’s established rights. Revoking suggests that the state has a “moral” right to eliminate the community’s right, for example if a community violates its contractual terms by exploiting a resource beyond the parameters of its legally-defined withdrawal rights.