Communal Tenure and the Governance of Common Property Resources in Asia: Lessons from Experiences in Selected Countries

ABSTRACTED FROM SUMMARY: This paper presents an overview of the distinctive features of communal tenure in different community-based land and natural resource management systems. Communal tenure refers to situations where groups, communities, or one or more villages have well defined, exclusive rights to jointly own and/or manage particular areas of natural resources such as land, forest and water. These are often referred to as common pool resources: many rural communities are dependent on these resources for their livelihood. In communal tenure, both the boundaries of the resource owned in common and group membership are clearly defined. These are necessary conditions to exclude outsiders and to secure the rights of group members so that these rights cannot be taken away or changed unilaterally. Communal tenure will very likely play a significant role in the policies and actions for climate change mitigation. With the emergence of initiatives for Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation (REDD and REDD+), governance and benefit sharing of carbon finance become critical questions in defining who owns the carbon stocked in forest. Marketable community rights to this special resource unit (stocked carbon) must be supported by national legislation that favors communal tenure of some of the carbon properties. This may lead to a separation of rights to carbon from the broader rights to the forest and land, an aspect not yet addressed by theoretical work on communal tenure.

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