Deborah Barry: "The invisible map: Community tenure rights in the forest"

A presentation by Deborah Barry, Governance and Forests Program, CIFOR (Center for International Forest Research) and Rights and Resources Initiative.Part of the University of Chicago Program on the Global Environment's inaugural conference on the Social Life of Forests, held May 30-31, 2008.Over the last 20 years, a little known trend of land tenure reforms has swept across the world?s southern forests, resulting in the official transference of tenure rights to communities of over 250 million hectares of forestlands. This so-called ?forest reform? (not agrarian reform) is transferring a broad set or bundle of rights to indigenous peoples, local communities and groups to access forestlands and resources, providing initial opportunity for improving the livelihoods of poor forest-dependent communities. Communal titles are the most widespread, with a wide range of land use rights within the perimeters.The definition of these rights, the marking of how and where they are held, who grants them, and who holds them are not straightforward under the ?classic? tenure system models. The range of land use rights from individual to common property use is obscured. Tools for mapping land use have expanded and become more participatory, helping to base these reforms on local institutions and rights, but are still largely in the hands of researchers and state agencies. These tools, increasingly incorporating GIS systems are excellent for using land use as a determinant of property boundaries or perimeters, but once these are established the knowledge is seldom available for communities themselves to use as a way to clarify, share or negotiate their complex systems of rights with outsiders. These internal customary practices and defacto rules-of-the-game adhered to by local communities are also dynamic, changing during different seasons, with new leadership, changes in forest product prices and often interacting with new rules imposed by external regulations or market opportunities once tenure is granted. There is a growing need to need to represent these rights - with a conceptual and practical framework - in order to both manage and defend them. This paper first presents a framework in which to consider how bundles of rights are distributed between the state, the collective, smaller groups and individuals within communal tenure systems. It then argues why the framework needs to be turned into a tool for multi-purpose participatory research at the intra and inter community levels. It makes the case that the tool can help communities themselves give visibility to internal tenure systems ?within the perimeters? of their forestlands. Finally, the paper mentions the issues and challenges that will need to be addressed as the development of this ?tool? goes forward.