Policy-Practice Seminar: Devolution of Natural Resources
Workshop: Developing Indicators of Secure Access to Common Property Resources (FULL)
Workshop: Community-based property rights
Workshop: Introduction to the Commons (FULL)
Workshop:
Rebuilding Policy for Common Property in Indonesia (NEW!!!)
A high-profile policy and practice seminar will be the kick-off event to the 11th biennial global conference of the International Association for the Study of Common Property (IASCP). The one-day event, sponsored by the International Development Research Center (IDRC), will be held on June 19, 2006 at the Arma Resort in Bali, Indonesia.
The seminar theme is “The Devolution of Natural Resources” and will focus on presenting information that advances and improves the implementation of common pool resource reforms internationally. During the 20th and 21st centuries, independent governments began to centralize the management of natural resources. Due to the vastness of the resources, protest by local people, shortcomings of centralized management, and a confluence of other social and political pressures, governments found it difficult to exercise effective authority. Governments were forced to reevaluate centralized policies and to look at who should be responsible for managing these resources. As a result of the above, new policies were implemented to devolve the management of natural resources. The transfer of natural resource management shifted from central governments to local community organizations or individuals. In order to better understand the impact of the implementation of devolution policies in Asia, this seminar will include presentations from countries within this region. The seminar will discuss the issues of implementation associated with devolution of natural resources from the perspective of both community and policy members.
The seminar will bring together local leaders, national and international researchers and policy-makers, who have practical experience working on the devolution of rights in natural resource management.
The seminar is being organized with the support of the following partners:
Pre-Conference Workshops
Developing Indicators of Secure Access to Common Property Resources (FULL)
Organizer: Andrew Fuys, International Land Coalition
Description:
Governments and international organizations have expressed repeated commitments to improving the lives of poor men and women through more secure access to land and other key natural resources. Efforts to monitor the implementation of these commitments, however, have been sporadic at best.
The Millennium Development Goals have revived interest among governments in measuring and tracking progress toward reducing poverty and eliminating food insecurity. This presents an important opportunity to influence the way that access to land and natural resources is assessed and measured, by developing indicators of secure access to common property that could be used on the national, regional and global levels.
While there is increasing interest among different stakeholders (including governments, civil society and international agencies) to monitor access to land, there remains a lack of consensus as to what constitutes “secure access” given the wide variety of tenure systems that exist. Where rural land tenure data is collected, it often reflects only an individual rights model (e.g., percentage of households with title deeds) that does not capture other systems of rights, such as rights to common property resources.
To address this policy challenge, this roundtable discussion would:
Identify potential indicators of secure access to common property, drawing on the analysis of participants at the IASCP biennial conference;
Gauge the feasibility of proposed indicators by identifying where data and data gaps exist; and
Build a network of researchers and practitioners who can support the development and implementation of relevant monitoring initiatives.
The co-organizers for this panel are the CGIAR's Collective Action for Property Rights Initiative ( CAPRi ) and the International Land Coalition (ILC). As global networks that bring together governments, civil society, research institutions and international agencies, CAPRi and ILC are situated to bring the outcomes of this panel discussion into policy- and decision-making processes.
A discussion paper for the session will be prepared that will review: (a) key components of tenure security in common property arrangements, including secure tenure is understood by poor men and women who rely on the commons, (b) potential indicators and existing initiatives to measure and monitor changes in secure access to common property, and (c) the practical challenges of applying proposed indicators on a national scale, given data availability and other feasibility criteria.
Case study featured:
“Securing tenure at Ekutheleni”
Author: Association for Rural Advancement (AFRA), South Africa
From 1998 to 2004, the men and women of Ekutheleni in South Africa sought to gain secure rights to their lands, and experience that has showed the real limitations and challenges of adapting the existing state system to communal lands and lands managed as common property.
Land holdings in Ekutheleni are not individually owned – the family has the main stake in the land, and Roman-Dutch legal exclusiveness is an unfamiliar concept. Fields are exclusive at times, commons in other times, depending on the seasons. The commonages serve not only as grazing lands, but also sources of basic necessities such as firewood and wild fruit, without which poor households could not survive.
Ekutheleni has a system around land that works, most of the time, for most of the people. It is cheap, local and relies on a pragmatic mix of historical practice, environment and specific social needs. Its key limitation is that it operates at a very local level, without support from and recourse to an external public system. It remains invisible to those who determine and allocate public resources.
Working with men and women at Ekutheleni, the Association for Rural Advancement (AFRA), a South African non-governmental organization, envisioned that that this system could begin to meet households' needs, if described and documented clearly. Thus began the work of PILAR, the Piloting Land Administrative Records initiative. Its goal was to provide legal, affordable and sustainable records to people holding land at Ekutheleni, to serve as evidence of tenure rights and improve their access to credit and municipal services. Working with AFRA, community members demarcated over 200 sites, including commons and public use lands, following locally accepted and familiar procedures.
Despite the recent passage of the Communal Land Rights Act (CLRA), however, the state legal framework still limits the extent that this approach can succeed in practice. Ekutheleni continues to slip through the cracks between the two tenure systems with which South Africa lives. Ultimately, as a South African, one is still visible or invisible, legal or extra-legal – it is not yet possible to be in the middle, moving toward visibility. Creating this possibility depends on how the implementation of the CLRA will be configured, and how open the government is to amending the law until it does work for the poor.
Community-based property rights
Organized by: Owen J. Lynch, Senior Attorney, Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL) in collaboration with public interest lawyers from Africa, Asia and the Pacific
Rural peoples comprise large majorities in most developing countries – and nearly half of humanity -- but are frequently neglected and oppressed by national laws and ignored by international institutions. The enduring tendencies of national law to override—and international law to overlook—the interests of rural people are historically rooted and continue to impede efforts to promote sustainable development and environmental justice.
Creative approaches and are urgently needed to respond to the problems and contributions of rural peoples, particularly those pertaining to community-based legal incentives for sustainable development and basic justice. CIEL ‘s Law and Communities (L&C) Program focuses on rural constituencies in developing countries, and particularly on issues related to community-based property rights (CBPR), including the commons.
Community-based property rights by definition emanate from and are enforced by local communities. The distinguishing feature of CBPRs is that they derive their authority from the community in which they operate, not from the nation state where they are located. Formal legal recognition or grant of CBPRs by the state, however, is generally desirable and can help to ensure that CBPRs are respected and used in pursuit of the public interest. CBPRs often include, but are not limited to, common property . They can also encompass various kinds of individual rights and kinship rights, such as inherited rights to agricultural fields and fallows, gardens, planted or tended trees or rattan clusters, and the like. CBPRs likewise can include rights to land, wildlife, water, forest products, fish, marine products, intellectual property, and so forth. CBPRs may vary in time and place to include rights to seasonally available resources such as fruit, game, fish, water, or grazing areas. They often specify under what circumstances and to what extent certain resources are available to individuals and communities to inhabit, to harvest, to hunt and gather on, and to inherit.
The L&C Program collaborates with public interest law partners in Africa, Asia, the Pacific and Latin America strives to identify and promote the best interests of local communities, including the identification and legal of CBPRs possessed by indigenous and other local communities throughout the Global South. Owen Lynch will lead off the discussion with an overview of theoretical and practical challenges faced by local communities and public interest lawyers in promoting legal recognition of CBPRs in the Global South. A general discussion will follow, including remarks by various public interest lawyers working for environmental justice and legal recognition of CBPRs, including the commons.
Introduction to the Commons (FULL)
Organized by: Erling Berge
The concept of the commons is the central theme for the group of academics,
practitioners, and government officials who are members of the IASCP and
participate in their global and regional conferences. At this workshop ,
participants will gain valuable insight about commons theory and will be
provided with answers to the following questions:
1. What is a commons?
2. Why is it important?
3. What are some historical and contemporary commons?
Participants in this workshop will also be provided with information on the
theoretical aspects of the commons such as: Characteristics of goods;
Collective action in the appropriation and consumption of goods; and The
politics of the commons.
Finally, this workshop will cover The institutions of the commons: Informal
and formal institutions and Land reforms.
Rebuilding Policy for Common Property in Indonesia
Organized by: Bogor University of Agriculture (IPB)
Indonesia, an archipelago of more than 18,100 islands, is blessed with abundant rich natural resources. Various economically important species are endowed in the Indonesian waters and upland area. The fisheries, agriculture, and forestry sectors, moreover, plays an increasingly important role in the national economy, especially as a source of income and employment opportunities, foreign-exchange earnings, source of animal protein for local diet and rural development. Nevertheless, such sectors are still identified as a source of poverty. The poor get less access to the agrarian sources such as sea, forest, and farm land that are mostly managed by the state. This tenurial issue leads to the need for a policy that emphasizes on how to improve management of the commons as a way to overcome poverty problems. Therefore, the workshop would:
The workshop is organized by Bogor Agricultural University, and invites IASCP conference participants to participate and discuss the realms of possibility for future network. The workshop can accommodate up to 50 participants.
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2006 Web Team
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