Energy and Environment

More on Land Tenure

Land titling is the most commonly practiced form of land tenure reform, despite abundant and growing evidence that titling - particularly in the name of an individual - does not necessarily provide the incentives for better land management. For example, in the case of mobile or semi-mobile land use, the key challenge in land tenure reform is to ensure that there are reciprocal agreements of access between land users. Therefore land tenure on the basis of individual and absolute title for mobile populations - even in the name of a group - may be inappropriate, as it would potentially take part of the resources out of an integrated landscape-based extensive land use system which necessitates users to access various resources at various times in various locations in that system. Furthermore, the most valuable and critical points in the system, areas of relatively reliable moisture, fertility and vegetation, are frequently allocated to well-connected persons (often outsiders with a trumped up connection to a local resource) through the often non-accountable workings of local representatives of a distant state authority.

It is therefore critical that innovations in legislative / power-sharing arrangements be facilitated at multiple scales in order to create a balance of power which will mitigate against the hijacking of the process. This is best done, as a starting point, by both examining cases where this has been successful and by making information about the nature of the process as widely public as possible. Only in this way will the resulting land tenure innovations truly reflect community interest and the ecological and economic realities of a local scenario. As these realities may of course change, the emphasis should be on the process, including adaptability and ever increasing land user participation, which itself would be an indication of success.

Past failures to combat desertification have been linked to a lack of local resource-user involvement and to an absence of solutions compatible with local land use strategies, which traditionally have been reflected in customary land tenure systems. Traditional legal arrangements are typically unwritten and therefore may be 'invisible' to state authorities and the formal legislative process. Nevertheless many societies in developing countries have deeply embedded preferences for customary approaches to rights to access, use, inherit or transfer title over land. This is because these laws are often rooted in the specific culture, morality, geography, ecology, economics and history of the area and users. This does not, however, mean, that they are necessarily always most appropriate as an incentive for sustainable land management, or that they are always still relevant or that they lack ambiguity. Nor do they necessarily prevent inequitable access to land and its resources, which is often more determined by local power relations than customary law, though may be justified with reference to them.

Special emphasis is needed to developing ways to ensure that marginalized groups - be they pastoralists, sedentary dryland communities, or women, for example - are able to benefit from land tenure reform programmes. Legal means, such as joint titles for married couples, could be accompanied by awareness-raising (ie civic education exercises on rights) and legal aid. Gender-sensitive technologies and natural resource management systems (addressing access to water, for example) also have great potential and much work has been done in this area, which needs to be drawn upon.

Finally, it is natural for a central authority, in the modern ideology of a nation state made up of citizens with equality before the law, to attempt to impose a standard legal code on the population, which has been attempted - if not achieved - since the colonial era. However where these laws impinge upon locally relevant resource use strategies, and in the context of lack of awareness of formal laws or contradictions between them and customary law or de facto practices, there is potential for resource capture by those with greater awareness of formal legislation and therefore of the state's authority.

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