Post Type: Article

A recent story from NPR described how slum mapping can be a powerful negotiating tool when used as a public record of problems such as dark street corners, limited toilets, or illegal dumping. In one of the largest slums in Nairobi, Kenya – home to an estimated 200,000 people – maps of slum areas enabled community members and authorities to identify available space to lay municipal water pipes. Around the world, slums lack street names, addresses, and, due to their informal nature, property rights. In densely populated slums, governments are often unable to provide basic infrastructure or services – even if they are inclined to do so – due to a lack of roads and paths in the densely populated communities.

Kenya-based Spatial Collective helps slum communities collect data and visualize it through GIS mapping. Their spatial analysis allows the community to see available resources, current and future needs, trends and solutions – all of which local civil society organizations can use to encourage city authorities to provide basic services. In the article from NPR, a specific case is noted in which people moved their structures so that a municipal water pipe might be laid, and agreed to do so only because they were convinced they could replace their informal structures. These maps of informal communities in which no one has legally recognized property rights are providing some record of occupancy and community-accepted boundaries, allowing a degree of stability.

As the article states, at least “the map provided some assurance – if not of actual ownership, then at least of a shared record of the past that allowed people to plan together for the future.” It’s clear that using relatively affordable and easy-to-use technology is granting some degree of security where before there was none.

Strengthening tenure security in slums can help increase access to basic services, lower violence, and promote economic development. It can also increase social protection for vulnerable populations – particularly women and children. According to Cities Alliance, “while both men and women living in slums face hardships, women – especially widows – are particularly vulnerable. They are more likely to be victims of violence or subject to cultural norms that do not give them the same legal rights or status as a man.”

USAID is also currently exploring opportunities to use low-cost technology and participatory mapping to record property rights through the Evaluation, Research and Communication (ERC) project.

A working draft of a Washington Declaration Diagnostic Framework (also in French) has been prepared by USAID for use by the Working Group on Artisanal and Alluvial Production (WGAAP) of the Kimberley Process Certification Scheme (KPCS). This tool is intended to help countries assess the status of their artisanal mining sector, and implement the principles outlined in the “Washington Declaration on Integrating Development of Artisanal and Small Scale Diamond Mining with Kimberley Process Implementation.”

Edits and comments on the draft Washington Declaration Diagnostic Framework will be collected by the Kimberley Process Administrative Support Mechanism through August 1, 2013. After finalization of the document, a pilot country will be identified in which to test the Diagnostic Framework.

The Kimberley Process, which has the objective of certifying rough diamond shipments as “conflict-free,” is not a development institution. However, it encourages the adoption of a number of best practices around economic development and actions in the artisanal and small scale mining sector.

Several of the Washington Declaration’s policy goals emerged from lessons learned under USAID’s Property Rights and Artisanal Diamond Development (PRADD) program. The PRADD program, which began in Central African Republic (CAR) in 2007, has worked to clarify and strengthen the property rights of artisanal miners. The result has been better monitoring of the artisanal diamond mining sector and improved livelihoods in artisanal mining communities. In CAR, legal diamond production in PRADD’s longstanding areas of intervention has increased 450% since 2010, compared to 21% for the rest of the country.

USAID recently announced that the PRADD program will be continued and expanded to Cote d’Ivoire and Guinea under a new successor program, PRADD II.

Land tenure security has been highlighted as one important link to food security in President Obama’s Feed the Future Progress Report, formally released this week. The report points out that in Tajikistan last year, the Feed the Future initiative supported the improvement of land rights and land use by working with the Government of Tajikistan to amend its land code to include ownership of land, use rights, and increased women’s equality. In addition, the U.S. government educated 38,000 rural citizens about their land rights and helped 6,838 farmers resolve their land issues through mediation and arbitration.

The May/June issue of FrontLines featured a story about how Feed the Future is supporting the expansion of a USAID-funded network of legal aid centers in Tajikistan that have helped more than 100,000 farmers learn about and assert their rights. Through the support of one NGO in the network, “Rural Women,” the number of registered women-led family farms in four districts increased almost threefold, from 87 to 240.

USAID Mission Director Anne Aarnes explained, “When women have more rights to land, there are cascading benefits for food security and poverty [reduction]. We have seen this firsthand in Tajikistan … When women gain freedom to farm, they grow healthier food for their families. They plant crops that last more than one season because they have faith that the land will still be theirs when the crops mature. It is inspiring to talk to women who went from not earning any money to being able to earn enough to send their children to university and to bring their sons home from migrant work abroad.”

USAID Deputy Administrator Donald Steinberg added, “Women’s access to land tenure, inheritance laws, to control what happens in agriculture sectors is key to development. If we could simply give women the same access to land, technologies and capital for farming that men have, we’d increase world food production by 30 percent. That means 150 million people would have access to food.”

Over the next five years, Feed the Future is expected to support USAID in enabling 200,000 Tajik women, children and other family members to escape poverty and undernutrition.

Follow the high-level discussion of the report, “Feed the Future: Growing Innovation, Harvesting Results,” during a panel on July 25 at 1:00 p.m. (Washington, DC). USAID Administrator Rajiv Shah will join former U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Dan Glickman, as well as members of Congress and participants from civil society and the research community to discuss the collective action required to achieve food security, address future challenges and highlight successes in advancing global food security, such as those outlined in the new Feed the Future Progress Report.

Live tweets of the event:
@FeedtheFuture
@USAID
@GlobalAgDev

A recent study in Ecology Letters suggests that protected areas in Tanzania are becoming increasingly important as a climate change adaptation measure. When surrounding landscapes become degraded, the protected areas serve as islands of habitat for several species of dry-land birds. The authors of the study conclude that the protected areas should be maintained as an effective means for achieving conservation and climate change adaptation objectives.

While the targeted use of protected areas is likely to continue to be an important strategy to ensure the survival of bird species and other wildlife throughout the world, critics have long argued that the “fines and fences” approach is ineffective. Many governments lack adequate resources to manage, monitor or enforce rules in parks and reserves. Critics also contend that protected areas amount to a “land grab” by conservationists because they push out people who have long depended upon such areas for their livelihoods.

An emerging alternative approach is community-based natural resource management (CBNRM). CBNRM typically involves the devolution of resource and/or land rights to local communities in combination with the development of sustainable wildlife-based livelihood options. To achieve conservation objectives, the conservation community must consider these more inclusive and incentive-based natural resource management (NRM) models.

By supporting CBNRM and other more inclusive conservation models, USAID is working to ensure that wildlife conservation does not restrict the rights and existing claims of local communities. USAID supports models that include:
1. The devolution of land and natural resource rights to local communities – in particular the right to exclude and sanction unauthorized uses;
2. Incentives for the community to adopt local or co-management arrangements (in collaboration with wildlife authorities); and
3. The development of alternative income-generating strategies, such as ecotourism, that also support conservation objectives.

The CBNRM model has been successfully employed in Namibia and elsewhere in southern Africa. Namibians have formed community conservancies and are legally empowered to benefit from eco-tourism businesses. Importantly, both wildlife numbers and ecosystems are rebounding after decades of war and poaching, and conservancy members’ lives are improving.

Learn more about Namibia’s CBNRM model.

See also: “Tenure and Indigenous Peoples: The Importance of Self-Determination, Territory, and Rights to Land and Other Natural Resources.”

Property rights are inexorably linked to taxes, largely because property taxes are often one of the easiest taxes to collect, particularly in developing markets with significant informal sectors. Indeed property taxes are often levied and paid around the world even when citizens lack deed or title to their property. From the point of view of the government, the details of who owns the property are often less important than the fact that the tax is paid – and threat of demolition or foreclosure is often enough to ensure that occupants pay the tax, whether they are the legally recognized owner or not.

Unfortunately, in many emerging economies, property tax appraisal and revenue collection is done in a way that lacks transparency. The process is often manual and conducted through physical visits to the property, which creates ample opportunity for rent seeking by the assessor and/or tax collector, and leaves citizens with little faith that their taxes ever make it into government coffers. Furthermore, property taxes are often seen as inequitable, with political elite, cultural leaders and large-scale land owners perceived as not paying their fair share. Greater transparency and improved collection processes can help eliminate the perception, and sometimes the reality, of this disparity. Broad-based property taxes can ensure more efficient land use and encourage large land holders who are not making productive use of the land to divest themselves of property.

A recent article in The Economist highlights the use of property tax as one of the most efficient and least distortive ways for governments to raise funds, particularly in emerging economies that on average earn less than 2% of revenue from property taxes – as opposed to the average of 5% in developed economies. Property taxes are particularly important for emerging economies seeking to decrease their dependence on international aid. Property taxes can also help create a closer link between citizens and government. When citizens pay taxes, it creates a greater degree of accountability by the government regarding how tax revenues are spent and a pressure from tax payers to ensure tax income be invested locally.

These themes – taxes and transparency – were a major focus of the 2013 G8 Summit in Northern Ireland, which featured commitments from G8 countries to establish the automatic exchange of information between tax authorities and improve transparency in land transactions. In coordination with these commitments, the U.S. has announced two partnerships: one with Burkina Faso to improve transparency in land governance and one with Guinea to improve transparency in extractive industries.

Increasingly, companies that depend on forests for their products are recognizing the need to establish environmentally and socially sensitive forest management practices. With government agencies and large corporations demanding paper products that have been certified by a third-party organization, companies have seen that certification generates returns on investments.

According to Kim Carstensen of the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC), speaking to the New York Times, an estimated 10-12% of the world’s commercial forests are now certified and in the past five years, the number of companies with FSC certification has grown to 25,000. Tetra Pak, the multi-billion dollar container manufacturer, relies on paper from an estimated 2.5 million acres of harvested forest every year. Tetra Pak will not use wood that has been cut illegally or wood from places where there are violent disputes with indigenous people over the ownership of forest resources. Like the International Voluntary Guidelines for the Responsible Governance of Tenure of Land, Fisheries, and Forests, FSC principles include recognition of tenure and use rights and responsibilities and indigenous peoples’ rights.

However, according to Greenpeace, with increased growth and demand for FSC certification, it “has not been successful in applying its system and standards consistently.” Greenpeace and other advocacy organizations allege abuses and conflicts involving FSC-certified companies in the Congo Basin, Indonesia, and Brazil and argue that FSC certification alone is not sufficient to stop unsustainable logging of intact and high conservation value forests.

FSC is actively trying to address weaknesses in its certification system and strengthen its oversight of certified companies. Both consumer expectations of companies’ practices and sustainable operations are putting pressure on less responsible operators. In March 2013, Greenpeace released a four-point action plan, which states, “While FSC faces challenges, we believe that it contains a framework, as well as principles and criteria, that can guarantee socially and ecologically responsible practices if implemented correctly.”

Certification of socially and environmentally sustainable forest management practices also reflects the goal of the Tropical Forest Alliance 2020. TFA2020 is a nascent public-private partnership supported by the U.S. Government to promote voluntary efforts to reduce tropical deforestation caused by commodities production, including pulp and paper.

In the first week of June, the International Land Coalition (ILC) coordinated a workshop to design a Rangelands Observatory, intended to link a network of organizations that will partner in an effort to collectively monitor land acquisitions in rangeland areas, and promote more participatory decision making in regards to land use.

Because rangelands that lack permanent residents are often seen as being under-utilized and free from use rights, they are particularly at risk of being acquired by investors through large-scale land acquisitions. However these rangelands are often crucial to the survival of grazing animals – both wild and domesticated – as well as to the communities whose livelihoods depend on those animals.

Over the course of the workshop it was noted that only about half of the 30+ attending organizations had defined the boundaries of their traditional grazing areas using some form of geospatial technology. The need to spatially define claims and use rights relevant to pastoralists was quickly recognized and the possibility of utilizing crowd sourced spatially referenced data was raised.

As the Rangelands Observatory and similar regional observatories are developed, it will be interesting to see whether such crowd sourced data regarding grazing rights might provide a level of protection to traditional land users that might lack formal documentation. Lessons learned by the Rangeland Observatory could also be applied in other countries where USAID is working on pastoral tenure issues, such as Ethiopia.

Through the recently launched Evaluation, Research and Communication (ERC) project, USAID is also exploring opportunities for using low-cost mobile phone technology to collect geospatial data and demarcate boundaries through crowd sourced methods. According to Frank Pichel, USAID Land Tenure and Property Rights Specialist, “We are looking at ways to leverage increasingly available and low cost technologies with innovative data collection models to help record and protect the property rights of some of the world’s poorest and most vulnerable populations.”

From Latin America to Southeast Asia, land rights and resource governance are at the center of many conflicts around the globe. In Colombia, land and rural development are the first agenda items in the ongoing peace negotiations between the Colombian government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). In Burma, the world’s longest-running civil war has left over 450,000 people internally displaced, with approximately 215,000 more in refugee camps along the Thai border. In both countries, the governments have been involved in peace negotiations with various armed ethnic rebel groups. In Burma, however, the ongoing peace process has largely ignored housing, land and property rights of the country’s displaced ethnic people according to a recent report from the international NGO, Displacement Solutions.

A major risk identified in the report is that large numbers of people have been displaced from areas with strong customary tenure systems. Given that the Burmese government does not recognize rights granted under these systems, significant populations are at risk of not being able to return to lands they once occupied. By not allowing hundreds of thousands of people to return to land they fled during the conflict, the government’s position contravenes the Pinheiro Principles and other widely accepted international legal standards, which give displaced people the legal right to recover their homes, lands and properties. The failure to address these issues could pose significant challenges to recent ceasefires or result in a return to full blown civil war.

Burma should look to other countries around the globe, including Timor-Leste and those of Central and Eastern Europe, to learn how important questions of land restitution have been addressed. Other valuable resources include the Land and Conflict Prevention Handbook and USAID’s Issue Brief on Land Disputes and Land Conflict.

A recent CIFOR paper finds that addressing tenure and property rights issues at the REDD+ project level may be insufficient to achieve REDD+ objectives. REDD+ proponents in several countries are devoting substantial resources to address tenure issues at a project level, but the authors suggest that these efforts may be insufficient to address tenure problems that arise from broader national conditions. These tenure challenges “…have deep roots in history, are national in scope, and have origins that often lie well beyond the boundary of the project site. The best remedies in many cases cannot be the piecemeal efforts at tenure clarification within the bounds of the project, but instead require wholesale, landscape-wide reform.”

The authors used surveys and focus groups to collect data from REDD+ project proponents (international non-governmental organizations and others involved in REDD+ planning and implementation) and community stakeholders at 19 project sites and 71 villages in five countries, including Brazil, Cameroon, Tanzania, Indonesia, and Vietnam. Household respondents were asked to comment on perceived tenure insecurity, outsider use of forest land and resources, exclusion rights, and local rule compliance.

The authors found that REDD+ proponents are devoting substantial resources to address tenure issues at the project level, but suggest that these efforts may be insufficient to address tenure problems that arise due to national circumstances. Further, all but one of the REDD+ proponents interviewed for the study intend to restrict access to some portion of local forests, with possibly negative implications for the rights and livelihoods of local stakeholders

The perceived right to exclude “outsiders” will be important for communities that take on the responsibility of forest management to achieve REDD+ emissions reductions. Villagers surveyed reported success in excluding outside claims in 58% of the villages and failure to exclude outside claimants in 18%. The authors suggest that this reported percentage of successful exclusion is insufficient if the number of outside claimants and the extent of competition from “outsiders” increases. There is also concern that poor seasonal, temporary, and nomadic resource users may lose the ability to access and use forests where community rights are strengthened, such as the Baka of Cameroon.

In order to achieve equitable and effective REDD+ objectives, the authors recommend that clarity is needed around the following tenure and property rights problems: rights over forest carbon; the undetermined structure and amount of incentives; benefit sharing among stakeholders; and the ability to exercise rights of exclusion to avert a rush on resources.

USAID has launched the Tenure and Global Climate Change Project to support efforts in REDD+ countries to integrate tenure policies and laws with local efforts to clarify and recognize land and forest rights. The project aims to clarify: forest carbon ownership, the rights of various stakeholders, and the distribution of benefits from REDD+. This focus reflects the emerging consensus that, as the authors note, “general tenure clarification…is important for attaining a broad range of development and environment goals…” and that “resolution of tenure is crucial” for implementing REDD+ measures that are effective and equitable. This reinforces a recent commentary that noted the importance of reforming tenure in order to create enabling conditions for REDD+.

The same issue of World Development also includes supporting case studies from Ecuador, Brazil, and Indonesia, all of which were presented at a USAID TransLinks-supported workshop in October, 2011.

During the recent “Open for Growth: Trade, Tax and Transparency” event preceding this week’s G8 summit in Northern Ireland, the United States and Guinea announced a partnership focused on supporting transparency in extractive industries. Transparent management of Guinea’s mining sector – which accounts for 95 percent of the country’s exports – is essential for the nation’s long-term economic growth and sustainable development.

The partnership will focus on supporting Guinea to enhance its compliance with the Kimberley Process Certification Scheme (KPCS) and adopt principles outlined in the recently adopted Washington Declaration. USAID will build off of its prior investment in the Property Rights and Artisanal Diamond Development (PRADD) project and work with the Guinean Ministry of Mines and Geology to clarify and strengthen the property rights of artisanal miners. Through strengthened property rights and improved tracking of diamonds from mine site to export, the diamond industry will achieve greater transparency, resulting in a greater number of diamonds entering the formal sector and ensuring that the Government of Guinea benefits from taxes.

Additionally, the United States Geological Survey (USGS) and the Ministry of Mines and Geology will continue to collaborate in an effort to better define the production capacity of the alluvial diamond sector and develop local ability to measure and analyze rough diamond production capacity. Developing greater understanding of market potential will ensure increased transparency as well as better monitoring and enforcement of the KPCS.

While enforcement of the KPCS has lagged in recent years, with rough diamond exports more than double the estimated carat production capacity, the Government of Guinea has made a renewed commitment to transparency in the extractive industries, as demonstrated by their recently launched public database detailing all national mining contracts.

Frank Pichel, USAID Land Tenure and Property Rights Specialist, said “USAID is excited to restart PRADD activities in Guinea, a sentiment echoed by the Guinean delegation at the recent Kimberley Process Intercessional in Kimberley, South Africa.”

See here for more information on Guinea.