This document outlines the objectives and approach for a study on forest tenure security and reforms. The study aims to: 1) Document experiences with formalizing customary forest rights and identify impacts of tenure reforms on vulnerable groups. 2) Identify factors constraining reform implementation. 3) Disseminate lessons learned. The study will take a diagnostic approach, comparing tenure security across multiple domains - legal provisions, actual practices, perceptions, and external threats. It will involve extensive surveys, interviews, workshops and knowledge sharing to understand tenure security from various perspectives. Feedback is sought on the best way to comprehensively cover the key variables influencing tenure security and outcomes of reforms.

1. Understanding Tenure Security in the
Implementation of Reforms: Clarifying
Concepts and Methods
6 October, 2014
24th IUFRO World Congress: Sustaining Forests, Sustaining People: The Role
of Research, October 5-11, 2014
Mani Ram Banjade

2. Outline
Motivation
Research objectives
What is forest tenure?
Tenure security
Domains of tenure security
Research approach and methods

3. Why to study forest tenure?
Changing context
of tenure reform
Historical
analysis of
emergence and
development of
tenure reform
Fragmented
studies: Focus
either on policy
or outcomes
A comprehensive
research on
policies and laws,
implementation
process and
outcomes
Varied outcomes
of forest tenure
reform
implementation
 Outcomes on
livelihoods,
forest resource
and tenure
security
 Challenges

4. Motivation: Paper vs on the ground
On the ground: Close
to 2 decades of reforms
ostensibly aimed at
securing local tenure
 Improve livelihoods
 Incentives for
sustainable land
management
Uneven, with mixed results:
 Not ambitious enough/full rights?
 Customary systems
unaccounted for
 On-going external threats via
competing uses
 Internal differentiation, including
gender
 Implementation
gaps/bottlenecks
On paper: Between 2002-2013 considerable increase (128.5
Mha) in forest area under ownership of or designated for
local communities (RRI, 2014)

5. Objectives
 Establish how forest tenure reforms
emerge, and document experiences and
options for formal approaches to securing
customary rights.
 Identify impacts of tenure reform on
rights and access of women, poor men and
ethnic minorities to forests and trees.
 Identify factors that constrain reform
implementation.
 Disseminate lessons learned and
knowledge generated at sub-national,
national, regional and international levels.

6. Purpose
Getting your feedback on concepts of tenure
security to help us organize the methods for
the study across 3 countries in 3 world regions

7. What is forest tenure?
 ‘the social relations and institutions governing access to and
use of land and forest resources’ (Larson et al. 2012).
 Forest tenure systems
• State forest tenure systems vs community forest tenure
system (Safitri, 2010)
• Formal vs informal systems
 Whose rights: Rights assigned to individual, group,
communal, customary or state
 De jure vs de facto rights

8. Bundle of rights
 Schlager and Ostrom (1992): access,
manage, exclude and alienate
 FAO, 2011: rights to use, manage, control,
market products, inherit, sell, transfer,
dispose of, lease or mortgage.
 RRI 2012: access, withdrawal,
management, exclusion, alienation,
duration and extinguishability of Rights
 Management rights: Rule-making,
compliance monitoring and disputes
adjudication (Agrawal and Ostrom 2008)

9. Tenure Security
 Mwangi and Meinzen-Dick (2009: 310): ‘the ability of an
individual [or group] to appropriate resources on a continuous
basis, free from imposition, dispute or approbation from outside
sources…’ It is the certainty of scope of rights and duration.
 Tenure security involves what rights, for whom, for how long,
with what certainty
 Analysis differs based on domains of tenure security: normative
or statutory provisions (legal statements), actual practices
(enforcement of formal rights and social norms), how actors
perceive them, and consideration beyond lived experience

10. Domains of tenure security
Normative
(De jure)
Actual
(De facto)
Perception of
tenure security
Risks beyond
perception

11. Normative tenure security
Robustness of
property rights
Legality
Clarity
Bundle of
rights
• Legal basis
• Granting authority
• Right holders
• Scope: rights and
obligations
• Boundaries
• Ways of exclusion
Duration of
rights
Assurance of
rights
Legal protection
against expropriation
Conflict resolution
mechanism
Participation in
decision-making

12. Actual tenure security
 Interaction of actors, rules
and power
 Compliance
 Conflicts and conflict
resolution
 Technocratic/managerial
dimensions: motivations,
incentives, capacities,
budgets/staffing

13. Perception of tenure security
Perception of the certainty of the rights irrespective
of the breath or the duration of rights offered.

14. Threats to tenure security
 Extractive activities
 Large-scale investments: land
grabs
 Demographic pressures:
population growth, migration
 Elite capture
 Resource-based conflicts

15. Tenure security
Interaction of
rules, norms,
actors
Enforcement
of rights
Perception of
certainty of
rights
Perception of
threats Threats beyond
perception

16. Research approach
 Diagnostic research and analysis: Cross-country
comparison, extensive surveys, policy and legal
analysis, FGD, key informants interviews, documents
review
 Multi-actor engagement: joint problem solving,
future scenarios, experience sharing
 Knowledge sharing: workshops, needs assessments,
tools (eg conflict resolution; gender integration);
tenure literacy

17. Your inputs
 How do we study this?
 What is the best way to cover all these
variables?
 Do we have to cover them all?
 Are we missing anything?

18. m.banjade@cgiar.org
http://www1.cifor.org/forest-tenure/home.html