Tenure Focus: Government Policies
Governance and policies are essential to effective tenure and the sustainable management of forests. These actions can help prevent injustices, corruption and criminality that perpetuate insecure tenure and land rights to local people. It is very important that local people and local communities are capable of defending and securing their rights. The establishment of incentives to protect forests requires the implementation of policies and strong reinforcement of resource tenure if it is faced with extreme poverty or the enticement of corruption. Additionally, issues of financial mechanisms and transfers should be dealt with by governments in order to guarantee the allocation of benefits to local people.Tenure can be monitored under state law, which usually entails state or private ownership, or it can be transformed into local or customary tenure systems that usually lack proper legislation and are not monitored under state law. REDD faces many issues concerning the convoluted interaction between state and customary tenure. The REDD scheme is met with many hindrances and problems in improving governance in which “the resources and time needed to improve such governance may simply be too great” (Cotula and Mayers 2009, 7).
Land Rights of Indigenous Groups (Customary)
There exists a diverse array of customary land rights of indigenous groups that tend to change frequently, making them difficult to categorize. Communities that uphold customary rights are vulnerable to being disregarded by national economies and important decision-making. One of the critical issues with REDD schemes is the importance of protecting customary tenure systems and allowing them to be identified under national law (Cotula and Mayers, 2009).
Below is a video of an indigenous population in the Democratic Republic of the Congo who share the same concerns regarding the implementation of REDD just as will be extrapolated in our case study.[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/H6_k0CXcHwQ" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]