Research since the 1990s highlights the importance of tenure rights for sustainable natural resource management, and for alleviating poverty and enhancing nutrition and food security for the 3.14 billion rural inhabitants of less-developed countries who rely on forests and agriculture for their livelihoods. Which rights or combination of rights an individual, household, or community has affects whether they have access to land and resources, as well as how those can be used and for how long. Equally important is the degree to which landholders perceive their tenure to be secure. Landowners are more likely to engage in land and resource conservation if they perceive that the likelihood of losing their land or resource rights is low. Between 2013 and 2021, the CGIAR Research Program on Policies, Institutions, and Markets (PIM) supported researchers to explore the drivers of tenure insecurity and their consequences, as well as mechanisms that can enhance tenure security. Their work focused on rights held by individuals and households as well as collectively held rights. Studies found that tenure insecurity has a variety of negative consequences for natural resource management, agricultural productivity, and poverty reduction, but the sources of tenure insecurity differ for men and women, and for individual, household, and collective lands. Statutory recognition of customary rights, multistakeholder processes such as for land use planning, and organized social alliances such as Indigenous Peoples’ groups have emerged as important mechanisms for securing rights or enhancing access to collectively held lands. Long-term partnerships, ongoing engagement, and training for multiple actors at multiple scales increases the likelihood of successful implementation of tenure reforms. Further research on tenure security can contribute to achieving the Sustainable Development Goals, especially by clarifying how customary tenure can provide security and how tenure affects decision-making in multistakeholder platforms.
Tag: customary rights
Rates of tree cover loss in key biodiversity areas within Indigenous Peoples’ lands
Indigenous Peoples’ lands (IPL) cover at least 38 million km2 (28.1%) of the global terrestrial surface. These lands can be important for biodiversity conservation. Around 20.7% of IPL intersect areas protected by government (PAs). Many sites of importance for biodiversity within IPL could make a substantial but hitherto unquantified contribution to Global site-based conservation targets. Key Biodiversity Areas (KBAs) represent the largest global network of systematically identified sites of high importance for biodiversity. We assessed the effectiveness of IPL in slowing biodiversity loss, both within and outside PAs, by quantifying tree cover loss in KBAs at international and national levels and comparing it with losses at equivalent sites outside mapped IPL. Based on a matched sample of 1-km2 cells in KBAs inside and outside of mapped IPL, tree cover loss in KBAs outside of PAs was lower inside IPLs when compared to outside mapped IPLs. By contrast, tree cover loss in KBAs inside of PAs was lower outside mapped IPLs than inside IPLs (although the difference was far smaller). However, national rates of tree cover loss in KBAs varied greatly in relation to their IPL and PA status. In half of the 44 countries we examined individually, there was no significant difference in the rate of tree cover loss in KBAs inside and outside mapped IPL. The reasons for this inter country variation could help understand the importance of IPL in meeting the CBD’s ambition of conserving 30% of land by 2030. Critical to this will be coordinated action by governments to strengthen and enforce Indigenous Peoples’ rights, secure their collective systems of tenure and governance, and recognize their aspirations for their lands and futures.
Indigenous and Customary Land Tenure Security: History, Trends, and Challenges in the Latin American Context
This chapter explores Indigenous and customary tenure regimes, considering the differing historical trends in the statutory recognition of customary tenure arrangements. Indigenous and customary land tenure regimes are dynamic, responding to changes in local-to-global socio-ecological conditions and political and market influences, as well as context-specific and based on historic socio-environmental relations. Despite trends toward legal recognition, a disconnect remains between titling or recognition and the security of these regimes. After defining Indigenous and customary land tenure regimes, we discuss their evolution from colonial encounters through the post-colonial era, on to trends in customary tenure recognition today. Finally, drawing primarily on evidence from Latin America, we explore how tenure insecurity of Indigenous and customary lands remains a significant challenge to realizing sustainable development across diverse landscapes.
Achieving political rights, enhancing forest livelihoods: Latin American Indigenous and Afrodescendant women’s views
This chapter discusses sociocultural and political processes constraining Indigenous and Afrodescendant women’s community forestry engagement, and how this influences their decision-making and benefit-sharing participation. Based on multi-stakeholder platform discussions by Latin American Indigenous and Afrodescendant women, it focuses on systemic and structural constraints on their visibility and effectiveness as peer political rightsholders. It presents the factors required to advocate for secure women’s rights in collective tenure systems and community forestry initiatives. These highlight the need to broaden the definition of community forestry to ensure women’s recognition as legitimate stakeholders, and their role in ethno-territorial livelihood strategies and knowledges.
Rights-based approaches and Indigenous peoples and local communities: Findings from a literature review
This preliminary assessment of rights-based approaches (RBAs) seeks to contribute to the ongoing discussions of RBAs for Indigenous Peoples and local communities (IPs and LCs). RBAs purposefully position the recognition of, respect for, and access to individual and collective rights as central to an initiative’s planning, design, implementation, process monitoring, and outcomes. In mainstream climate change, conservation, and development programs and policies, this means refocusing the relationship between “beneficiaries” and “implementers” to one of rights-holders and duty-bearers. RBAs hold growing discursive importance in relation to the rights of IPs and LCs in conservation and climate change spheres, including the agendas of international agencies. The growing interest in RBAs, and their inclusion in frameworks that will guide development, conservation, and climate projects over the next decade, is laudable. However, there are few reviews that seek to understand how RBAs emerged and how they have been conceptualized. Such analysis is a necessary basis from which to advance discussions on the impact of RBAs and provide lessons to support them. In this review, our primary interest is the conception, conceptualization, and implementation of RBAs in forest-based initiatives, but we reviewed the wider scholarly and gray literature on RBAs in development, conservation, and climate action initiatives.
Living customary tenure systems in Madagascar: An overview
Key messages
- Forest landscape restoration in Madagascar is likely to target forests and pasturelands managed as commons under customary tenure claims that are unrecognized by the state.
- Efforts to promote policy reforms that recognize customary claims to commons are hampered by limited information about the tenure systems that govern these spaces.
- Policy makers must recognize the diversity in Malagasy tenure systems when crafting legislation that recognizes customary claims to commons.
- The extent to which traditional authorities retain legitimacy is arguably a major factor in whether customary tenure systems in rural Madagascar provide stable and effective frameworks through which rights to land and resources are allocated and conflicts resolved.
- Action-research is needed to bridge the gap between state law and local practices with respect to women’s land rights.
How-to-note on monitoring and evaluation for gender transformative projects
This brief provides an overview of the monitoring and evaluation (M&E) approach employed for a GTA project, outlining the M&E strategy used and offering recommendations and hands-on tools for similar initiatives to enhance effectiveness, while fostering a culture of continuous learning and improvement.
Developing Gender Transformative Approaches to Strengthen Women’s Rights in Kyrgyzstan. Foundational Gender Analysis
The project paired with the Global Initiative, the Access to Markets Project (ATMP) (2016-2024), aims to raise incomes and enhance economic growth in pastoralist communities. Its development objective is to improve access and integration of smallholder livestock farmers into remunerative markets for their products, leading to improved and equitable returns.
Gender analysis to inform the development of gender transformative approaches to enhance women’s land rights in Kyrgyzstan
The Resilience of Organisations for Transformative Smallholder Agriculture Project (ROOTS) project was engaged as a co-financing mechanism as per the Gambia National Agricultural Investment Plan-Food and Nutrition Security (GNAIP-FNS II, 2017-2026) – to address the government’s priority concerns including account deficits, public services, population growth, outmigration of youth, agricultural productivity, climate change and environmental degradation, with the support of the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD).
Gender analysis to inform the development of gender transformative approaches to enhance women’s land rights in the Gambia
The Resilience of Organisations for Transformative Smallholder Agriculture Project (ROOTS) project was engaged as a co-financing mechanism as per the Gambia National Agricultural Investment Plan-Food and Nutrition Security (GNAIP-FNS II, 2017-2026) – to address the government’s priority concerns including account deficits, public services, population growth, outmigration of youth, agricultural productivity, climate change and environmental degradation, with the support of the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD).