Land tenure and natural resource management interventions: conception, implementation, effectiveness, impacts

Section run by CIRAD  and GRET

The texts presented in this section deal with interventions on land tenure and renewable natural resources (called “land” resources from a generic standpoint). This term encompasses all public interventions and interventions related to development projects that aim to concretely modify the nature or distribution of rights to land and natural resources, or the ways in which they are managed (rules, organisational systems, etc.). Normally, they are land policy implementation modalities (cf. the “land policy” section) but sometimes they play the role of testing innovative modalities that may later influence policy. Land tenure interventions are subjects of reflection for both the social sciences (political sociology, development anthropology, management sciences, etc.) and land policy actors themselves.

Different types of land tenure initiatives can be identified:

• those that modify the distribution of rights among actors : redistributive agrarian reform, land consolidation, subdivision, development plans, etc.;
• those that provide legal recognition of existing informal or extra-legal rights (customary rights, squatters’ rights, etc.) : land tenure regularisation operations, rights formalisation operations, cadastral registration operations, vesting local bodies with control over renewable natural resources, etc.;
• those that modify the institutional framework for managing land or resources : the setting up of land information systems, institutional reform of land or forest administrations (decentralisation, computerisation, etc.), the setting up of decentralised or community management of renewable natural resources, the formation of local renewable resource management committees, etc.; and
• other development interventions or interventions linked to the mining of natural resources that may have an impact on land tenure, such as dams, mines, industrial lumber concessions, or even the creation of protected lands (displacement of populations, re-settlement, etc.).

Here, land tenure interventions are analysed or evaluated from various angles:

• their theoretical justifications (see also the sub-sections on the analysis and history of land policies and on stakes and debates for renewed public policies);
• their relationship to public policies;
• their negotiation and formulation processes;
• their modes of implementation; and
• their relationship to the socio-land realities on which they act.

Aurélie Binot, CIRAD

Philippe Lavigne Delville, GRET,

March 2007

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