Exhaustive analysis of tenure institutions is not the job of rapid appraisal. It is rather to notice problems and/or opportunities. Whether certain facets of the tenure system are seen as posing problems or opportunities tends to depend upon how far the process of project planning has proceeded and how committed the planners are to a particular technology and a mode of introducing it. (One never introduces a technology alone; technologies carry with them a great deal of baggage in terms of institutional needs for their introduction and maintenance.) If the project idea is still relatively flexible, it can be reworked to mesh with the local tenure situation. But a mismatch between the project idea and the local situation is often not noted until the project is underway. Then there is said to be a "tenure problem," though it might better be characterized as bad project design.
How do mistakes about tenure create problems for projects? First, project design may neglect social and institutional constraints which prevent farmers from responding to the tree-planting opportunities provided by the project. The International Livestock Center for Africa's Small Ruminants Program in Nigeria found that in on-farm trials in the south-east of the country, existing use and tenure patterns created community oppposition to tree-planting. An excerpt from the report by Francis follows. The planting would have interfered community control of land use. Households had been assumed to have more exclusive control of their holdings than was in fact the case.
Where customary tenure rules permit tree planting, the tenure system may still have an impact on incentives for tree planting. When farmers cannot have the use of the trees they plant, they are not likely to do a good job, even if short-term incentives are provided. Thomas (1964) found that peasants employed with "food-for-work" to plant trees in land where they had no rights responded by planting the trees upside down, roots in the air. A miscalculation of incentives may also occur when there is too narrow a focus on the particular land area on which the project encourages the farmer to plant trees. For instance, a project design will overestimate farmer incentives to introduce trees into the pattern of cultivation on the holding if it overlooks household rights of access to free wood from commons and reserve areas.
In addition, project design sometimes misidentifies beneficiaries of tree planting or may even lead to their displacement due to misunderstanding of tenure situations. A community forestry project in Pakistan which had aimed to plant on the commons as a means of spreading benefits throughout the community discovered that in fact influential families in the community had established effective control over large areas of the commons and were the ones who benefited from the project (Cernea 1981). Planting trees may increase dangers of displacement because a powerful neighbor or a traditional land administrator may seek to take the trees and the land with them. In Swaziland, for instance, even a few fruit trees may attract the wrong kind of attention, as related in the excerpt from Flory which follows. An insecurity of tenure which did not matter much before became critical when trees were planted. Where such risks are obvious, incentives to plant will be affected.
There are also situations in which tree planting will work to the disadvantage of some residents. There are often losers as well as winners in these projects. While such side-effects may not affect the cost-benefit analysis of a project which focuses only on the participant-beneficiaries, from a broader societal point of view that analysis is affected. Tree planting is generally an intensification of use which, in a situation of serial or simultaneous uses by different users, may exclude the other users of the land. For example, alley-cropping may require fencing to prevent uncontrolled browsing on young trees and may thereby exclude a traditional practice of grazing of fallow holdings as commons. At the household level, for example, if men in a particular culture are regarded as owning and managing a particular species of trees, introduction of these trees onto plots managed by wives may shift management rights over the parcel and income from the parcel to men. Women, the "invisible farmers," are often particularly vulnerable, as are very poor or peripetatic users. After the main uses of particular land and trees have been established, the question must be asked: "Is there anyone else who uses this land or these trees, even occasionally?"
These are recurring tenure "problems" in community forestry projects, problems which originate in the failure to adequately take tenure patterns into account in project design. How can we increase the chances they will be perceived during a rapid appraisal? This paper goes on to suggest promising methods and angles of approach for appraisal of tenure systems, then examines particular tenure issues associated with the three basic types of tenure niches discussed earlier, the holding, the commons and the reserve.