COMMUNITY TENURE

A recent study in Guatemala provides an example that community stewardship of tropical forest can be a viable model for conserving forest and for achieving livelihood benefits.

Land tenure rights are widely recognized as being central to advancing sustainable development goals, but they are only one part of the picture. As it happens, tenure rights to trees are entangled with, but different from, those to land, meaning both must be acknowledged to incentivize stewardship of the landscape by local communities.

In the 1970s, Nepal began an ambitious nationwide forests rights devolution program, eventually seeing a significant range of forest uses and management taken out from the purview of the national government and put in the hands of Community Forest User Groups (CFUGs). PIM-supported research by CIFOR looks at the changes in ecosystem services following the shift to CFUGs, showing a host of improvements, particularly for women.

The devolution of land tenure rights to forest-dwelling communities over the past quarter century has led to the development of entrepreneurial initiatives with substantial positive socio-economic outcomes for livelihoods, according to a leading scientist.