Abstract
I address a contentious element in forest property relations to illustrate the role of ownership in protecting and expanding of forest cover by examining the extent to which rural communities may legally own forests. The premise is that whilst state-owned protected areas have contributed enormously to forest survival, this has been insufficiently successful to justify the mass dispossession of customary land-owning communities this has entailed. Further, I argue that state co-option of community lands is unwarranted. Rural communities on all continents ably demonstrate the will and capacity to conserve forests – provided their customary ownership is legally recognized. I explore the property rights reforms now enabling this. The replication potential of community protected forestlands is great enough to deserve flagship status in global commitments to expand forest including in the upcoming new Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD).
Highlights
The Community Land Sector and its ForestsThe community land estate refers to community-owned lands held under customary, neo-customary or state law tenure, whether these are, or are not, presently acknowledged as properties
Sampling suggests that 18.7% of global land area in 2015 was legally recognized as community property or as public lands formally designated for exclusive community use (RRI 2015a)
Estimates of how much of the community domain is forested can be obtained by excluding sectors least likely to be present in the community land sector: plantations at 291 million hectares and protected forests at 651 million hectares subtracted from a global forest estate of 3.99 billion hectares (FAO 2016)
Summary
The community land estate refers to community-owned lands held under customary, neo-customary or state law tenure, whether these are, or are not, presently acknowledged as properties. While differences exist among these sub-sectors of community landholding, all share founding features of community-based property systems; they own the soil or the right to the soil in undivided shares They govern the use and disposal of the land themselves, with high dependence upon traditional norms at one extreme and adoption of state-dictated norms at the other. Most communities devise rules of access and use and other rights that distinguish between private rights allocated to individuals or families to exclusively use a plot for a homestead, business, or farm, and undivided common assets This distinction is least common among hunter-gatherer and pastoralist communities (Alden Wily 2012). Sampling suggests that 18.7% of global land area in 2015 was legally recognized as community property or as public lands formally designated for exclusive community use (a sample of 64 states) (RRI 2015a). This was revised upwards in 2020 to 26.3% for 42 countries (RRI 2020b)
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