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Close to 240 million people across the globe live in forested regions, particularly in developing countries. Local communities manage a third of forests worldwide, and their livelihoods depend on forests for the provision of essential ecosystem services. These communities often comprise marginalised minority or indigenous groups, with limited access to economic resources or social protection programmes.

Over the past two decades, many developing countries have revised land and forestry laws to provide greater recognition of local decision-making structures, indigenous territorial rights, and women's rights. While these reforms were intended to generate economic, social and environmental advances, outcomes have been uneven.

The Securing Tenure Rights for Forest Landscape-dependent Communities project (GCS-Tenure), implemented by FAO and executed by the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR), had field activities in Indonesia, Peru and Uganda. The project sought to improve the way forest and land tenure reforms are understood, communicated and used, so that decision-makers, practitioners and forest-dependent people in developing countries are well-equipped to develop and implement policies and initiatives that support tenure security, livelihoods and sustainable forest management.

FAO in action

Adopting participatory approaches to build knowledge and foster engagement

The participatory prospective analysis (PPA) approach adopted during the project allowed for direct input from stakeholders and beneficiaries, and increased the general understanding of forest tenure issues among them.

The PPA approach included a workshop in which participants from local communities, public authorities, experts and other stakeholders identified the key factors undermining land tenure security. Those factors were assessed and used as a basis for participants to envision different scenarios for land tenure policy improvement. The process resulted in evidence-based, actionable information to direct policy and action plans.

Building partnerships with local academia 

By establishing partnerships with universities across Indonesia, Peru and Uganda, the project was able to leverage considerable local knowledge on land tenure issues and tap into established networks across the project’s field sites. In each country, the project engaged a post-doctoral research fellow to coordinate between partners and to provide research skills benefitting stakeholders and the project itself. The partnerships were mutually beneficial as the universities incorporated the experience gained into their curricula.

In Peru, for example, the Universidad Agraria La Molina established a new course based on data-collection and analysis methodologies used by the project. The University of Pattimura in Indonesia leveraged the tools developed by GCS-Tenure for teaching and socio-economic research.

Key results

By 2019, the project delivered a number of positive outcomes at the international, national and local levels. It succeeded in raising awareness and building capacity among stakeholders, as well as mainstreaming sustainable land tenure approaches into countries’ policies and action plans. Results include:

• Implemented PPA involving 883 people, including 130 policy-makers and 64 NGO practitioners;
• improved awareness of barriers to, and impacts of, forest tenure reforms among 188 policy-makers at national and sub-national levels;
• launched international meetings and knowledge-sharing initiatives;  
• published a number of guides and reports, including country-specific guides on laws, policies and processes for formalizing forest rights of communities; 
• carried out an analysis of conflicts in rights formalization processes; and
• developed a guide on gender and interculturality in tenure reform developed.

GCS-Tenure publications are available on the CIFOR website.