Forest landscape restoration and tenure security in Madagascar

This report, “Forest landscape restoration and tenure security in Madagascar,” is a scoping study prepared within the research-action project “Forest landscape restoration for improved livelihoods: secure tenure to catalyze community action in Madagascar and Cameroon”, financed by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ).
This report pursues two main objectives: provide FLR practitioners and decision makers with an overview of the socioecological, governance, and tenure context shaping FLR in Madagascar; and distil key lessons learned from restoration and tenure initiatives to date, culminating in design principles for tenure-responsive and socially inclusive FLR.
Our analysis suggests that Madagascar has a solid foundation for scaling tenure-responsive FLR: high biodiversity and restoration potential; a national FLR strategy; a diversity of local institutions; and a growing portfolio of projects that link restoration with tenure and livelihoods. However, major challenges include persistent tenure insecurity in some areas and overlapping claims between state and communities; uneven and sometimes contradictory land law reforms; limited geographic coverage of FLR and land tenure security initiatives; structural rural poverty; and political and governance volatility.
We propose design principles for tenure-responsive and socially inclusive FLR. These principles centre around several key ideas: recognize and strengthen legitimate customary and statutory rights; work through and with locally legitimate governance institutions; tailor FLR strategies to different landscape types (including grasslands and pastoral systems); integrate livelihood support and equity considerations; and treat carbon finance and PES as tools to complement rights-based and participatory restoration rather than to replace them.

---

Download :

English

---

This works is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

---

---