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Terra Nullius: New RRI report (and upcoming guest post) on community land rights in tropical forests
As seen on Terra Nullius
By Rhodri C. Williams
The Rights and Resources Initiative (RRI) just released a new report indicating that forest peoples have “quietly gained unprecedented legal rights to the land and resources owned under customary law” over the last twenty years. However, the authors also express concerns about legal obstacles to the exercise of such rights and the risk of their rollback by elite groups seeking to facilitate international land and natural resource deals. According to RRI’s press release:
“Forest peoples are caught between the forces of a drive for environmental sustainability and the intense pressure of economic development”, said Jeffrey Hatcher, Director of Global Programs for RRI, and one of the authors of the new report. “Despite tremendous progress in establishing legal tenure regimes, a lack of political will and bureaucratic obstacles make it a struggle to implement any real action in most forest-rich developing nations. ….”
The report is described as providing “the most comprehensive global legal analysis to date of the status of forest tenure rights held by Indigenous Peoples and other local communities in more than two-dozen developing countries”, which together account for “approximately 75 percent of the forests of the developing world, home to some 2.2 billion people.” It was released together with a separate study on the positive development effects of recognizing customary forest tenure. Both reports taken together constitute the results of an analysis undertaken by RRI on the twentieth anniversary of the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, in order to inform the upcoming Rio+20 Conference on June 20-22.
I am very pleased to announce that Fernanda Almeida, the lead author of the report, will be guest-writing on TN next week in order to provide further analysis of the results of RRI’s research and insights on how these findings may be of practical assistance in efforts to secure the tenure rights of forest peoples.
Posted By David Robeck at 1:03pm on May 30, 2012
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