IUCN, the International Union for Conservation of Nature

Secure forest ownership is probably the most powerful stake a community can hold. It provides a stable platform upon which to develop a regime of sustainable management. Failure in state law to give legal weight to customary tenure, and to support the communal ownership of properties held in common, has been the single most influential factor in defining the relationship of people to forests in the past century. Had state law recognised common properties as group-owned lands, the foundation for locally-based forest management could have been nurtured and become a viable regime for retaining and sustaining forests in its own right.

A trend is underway to make customary rights in land legal, and this includes the right of people to own land in common. Through this measure communities are finding their tenure over local forest commons better secured. At the same time, forest strategies and legislation are being reformed, including new consideration of the role of civil society in forest management.
 

The opportunities through land reform are considerable and should be taken advantage of. In terms of community empowerment to own and manage forests, strategic thinking in forestry has evolved a lot and can offer land policy makers an important role to play in implementing new frameworks for integrated tenure and resource management.

For change in land and forest relations to be successful, a variety of community-level issues need to be addressed. This includes support for the emergence of communities as institutions endowed with meaningful powers for resource management. There is great potential for 'community' to emerge as one of the important new constructs through which society and its resources may be more successfully governed. Processes which look to communities as custodians over local forests represent an new avenue for this development, particularly in the context of power devolution and state bureaucracy down sizing.

However, there is a need to proceed with caution. Decentralisation on its own is not a panacea. To be meaningful it has to be accompanied by effective democratic structures which ensure that less powerful groups within a community, such as women and the poor, are not excluded or further marginalised, and also by effective and workable conflict resolution mechanisms.