Day 5, Session 8: Reforming land tenure - How to ensure effective reforms and implementation Presentation by James Murombedzi, ARD-Liberia

1. CBNRM Experiences in southern
Africa
James C. Murombedzi
ARD‐Liberia

2. CBNRM Experiences
• Southern Africa has been experimenting with
various initiatives to devolve natural resource
rights to rural communities since the 1980s
• Initiatives have focused on wildlife, forests and
forest products.
• These have resulted in the implementation of a
suite of programme interventions collectively
referred to as Community Based Natural
Resources Management (CBNRM) Programmes

3. Conclusions
• The region’s governments devolve control over
natural resources in inverse proportion to the
exchange values of the resources.
• CBNRM is parochial in several ways. It confers
only limited rights to distinct natural resources,
but does not address the broader resource
struggles of the rural poor
• CBNRM operates only in the communal tenure
regimes but does not address larger distribution
and equity concerns

4. Conclusions
• CBNRM is a minimalist attempt to reinvent
communal property rights without challenging
the large‐scale redistribution of property rights
that was achieved by settler colonialism in this
region.
• The CBNRM programmes are delinked from land
reform and local government reform processes,
and thus sometimes reinforce colonial
disempowerment of communities

5. Conclusions
• CBNRM programmes are decidedly apolitical.
Consequently, the focus of the initiatives is
managerial.
• Because the programmes are managerial,
they operate through committees and other
bureaucratic institutional arrangements that
are not embedded in local decision making
imperatives and arrangements.

6. Conclusions
• CBNRM programmes have generated limited,
sometimes even insignificant, benefits for
participating communities and households.
– The benefits tend to be defined by the state/local
gvt than by the participating communities
– The benefits tend to be generated by private
operators than by community enterprises

7. Conclusions
If CBNRM is not integrated into the broader
post‐colonial transformation agenda, it will
inevitably deliver ‘petty projects of municipal
socialism’ rather than real development options
for local communities.

8. Conclusions
• There is a counter narrative to CBNRM that is
becoming increasingly persuasive for
governments and donors
• Referred to as the “Back to the Barriers” this
narrative argues that CBNRM is ineffective,
and that central state control is the only real
option for sustainable NRM

9. Conclusions: The Way Forward
• What is required is an overhaul of the entitlements
system through a more holistic review of the
distribution of property rights,
• Reforming of the communal lands and native reserves
away from their current labour reserve status into
productive entities.
• In many ways, such an exercise is already underway
through the different land reform programs of the
region. CBNRM must thus make alliances and linkages
with the agrarian reform processes, and not remain
delinked from these transformation projects

10. Conclusions: The Way Forward
• In the absence of land reform in CBNRM,
communities have not been able to effectively
exercise their limited resource rights.
• CBNRM has been based on legal and policy
reforms in wildlife and forestry departments, and
has devolved rights which typically are not
empowering for communities.
• This has led to the question: “when do rights in
law become rights in reality?” Cousins (1997).

11. Conclusions: The Way Forward
The minimal steps necessary towards the realization of such rights
include:
‐ CBNRM initiatives must be located in broader agrarian reform
context
– setting up of land registration systems
– establishment of decentralized local structures responsible for the
management of land rights, and;
– the development of mechanisms for the resolution of land tenure
related disputes.

12. Intro
• Southern Africa contains about 30% of Africa’s
forests
• most of the region’s forests are not under any
formal management.
• Yet forests constitute a very important
resource for local livelihoods and national
economic development

13. Ineffective regulatory mechanisms
• African forest protection regulations are by
and large weak or ineffective
• Implementation tends to be problematic.
• Debt, unfavourable terms of trade and
economic development strategies on the
continent tend to encourage the mining of
forest resources

14. Institutional weaknesses of forest
management
• Forest management on the continent is
characterised by glaring institutional
weaknesses and policy failures that can be
broadly generalised at a sub‐regional level.

15. Southern Africa
• In southern Africa, most forest policies were
enacted in the 1970s, mostly during
colonialism, and have since become obsolete.

16. Origins of forest reforms in southern
africa
• Existing property rights systems in Sub‐Saharan Africa
have been extensively influenced by colonial and post‐
colonial state interventions that often have been
abrupt and contradictory (Scoones, 1995).
• Rapid changes in property rights and land tenure
systems dominated by exogenous factors started with
the formalization of colonialism at the Berlin congress
in 1885, and the most important factors continue to be
effective in today’s national states (Kirk, 2000).

17. Post‐colonial transformation: The
Labour Question
• The post colonial state in southern Africa is
typically confronted with the challenges of
resolving the impacts of long term
exploitation of its labour force by colonial
capital (the ‘labour question),

18. The ‘Native Question’
• integrating the indigenous population into the
citizenry of the post‐colonial state (the native
question),

19. The National Question
• and transforming the state itself in order to
create the basis for post colonial development
(the National Democratic Revolution). In
resolving this national question, perhaps the
most important policy issue in post colonial
transformation in sub Saharan Africa is the
agrarian question

20. Agrarian transformation
• In southern Africa, agrarian transformation is
dominated by the land question.
• This is particularly true to the post settler
colonial states of Namibia, Mozambique,
South Africa, and Zimbabwe, but also applies
to post colonial transformation in the rest of
southern Africa.

21. Labour reserve economies
• Southern African is made up of the former
‘labour reserve’ countries in which there was
widespread land alienation to colonial
settlers.

22. Indirect rule and the invention of
‘customary’ tenure
• Through the institution of indirect rule, the ‘customary’ in
Africa in relation to land as well as political status was
refashioned, or even reinvented by colonial interventions.
• To ensure the success of this project, colonial authorities
suppressed the commoditization of land, including the
development of land markets.
• Communal tenure was introduced in this context as part of
a package of economic and extra‐economic externalities to
limit the agricultural and other resource use potential of
the native populations, thereby coercing them into wage
labour and other dependencies for their own reproduction

23. Community based natural resources
management (CBNRM)
• Southern Africa has been hailed as a leading
innovator in designing and implementing
CBNRM programmes that extend rights over
natural resources to ‘local communities’. Most
of the CBNRM programmes of the region have
been based on the legal devolution of
narrowly delimited rights over specific
resources from state agencies to local
authorities or some representative body of
the ‘local community’

24. CBNRM
• However, community tenure and rights to
natural resources tend to be completely
divorced from the broader land distribution
and tenure context of the post colonial
transformation agendas of the countries of
the region.

25. CBNRM
• The managerialism of CBNRM means that the
programmes are preoccupied with management of
resources that produce immediate ‐if limited‐financial
benefits for the participating communities.
• The process by which the benefits are generated is
rarely an analytical category and is rarely
problematized in the CBNRM discourse.
• Yet it is quite clear that CBNRM has functioned to
secure access to communal (almost predominantly
wildlife) resources for mostly white capital
(Murombedzi, 2001).

26. Agrarian relations
• Southern Africa today is thus characterized by grossly
unequal and racialized agrarian relations, particularly in the
former settler colonies of South Africa, Mozambique,
Namibia and Zimbabwe.
• The colonial land owning classes historically owned up to
80% of the best agricultural lands, with the bulk of the
indigenous populations confined not only to arid and semi
arid zones,
• The central legacy of settler colonialism is the land
question. Except for Zimbabwe, this question remains
largely unresolved in Southern Africa.

27. Land tenure
• A land tenure system cannot be understood
except in relationship to the economic,
political, and social systems which produce it
and which it influences (Bruce, 1998).
• Extant land tenure systems in Southern Africa
are the outcome of the establishment of
sustained capitalist agriculture in the regions.

28. Land Tenure
• The principal characteristics of the agrarian
structure of the colonial economies were
tenure dualism and bimodalism, with
‘communal’ tenure dominating the small
holder sector.
• This agrarian structure has continued in the
post independence era, even despite various
land reform policies and initiatives.

29. Communal tenure
• Without exception, all the communal tenure
regimes of these regions are characterized by
high levels of state interventionism and
interference with land use, ranging from land
use planning to villagization and other
settlement reorganization schemes and
programmes.

30. Communal Tenure
• In this structure, communal tenure continues
to represent patterns of legally guaranteed
land and resource use, rather than constitute
a form of land ownership (Bruce, 1998).

31. Bimodalism
• With a few notable exceptions‐ Botswana and
Lesotho, the agrarian structure characteristic of
most southern African countries tends to be
bimodal.
• But even in unimodal systems such as in
Botswana, there are distinctive patterns of access
to customary lands which indicate that the
wealthy and powerful have access to more land
and water than the poor.

32. CBNRM emergence
• CBNRM emerged in this context as a policy
response to the on‐going challenges to the
dominant patterns of rural capital accumulation
within the natural resources sector.
• Challenges take the forms of struggles to create
new forms of resource rights by the local
communities, through the expansion of
agriculture into wilderness and other hunting
concession areas, poaching, or settlement and
other destructions of wildlife habitat.

33. CBNRM emergence
• The innovation of CBNRM has been to ostensibly
involve communities, through their local government
representatives in natural resources management
decision making.
• Because they are not land holding entities, the
‘communities’ themselves are not legal entities and
thus cannot enter into binding agreements in these
concession decisions.
• Typically, local authorities manage communal lands on
behalf of central governments, and thus have the legal
authority to contract.
• .

34. CBNRM as tenure reform
• By creating new and limited rights to natural
resources in essentially unchanged communal
tenure regimes, with no reference to the
wider issues of land redistribution,
distribution of access to high value natural
resources, credit markets and changes in the
administrative structures, CBNRM constitutes
limited tenure reform

35. CBNRM Parochial Focus
• CBNRM programmes have narrowly focused on the
devolution of property rights in wildlife and other
natural resources, typically those with high exchange
values and therefore high exploitation levels by
external interests. Because of this parochial focus,
• CBNRM does not have the capacity to transform
agrarian relations in the region.
• The alliances of international and local capital in the
exploitation of these resources combine to support the
CNRM lobby and limit the effectiveness of the peasant
struggles for agrarian reform.

36. CBNRM Parochial focus
• The result, typically, has been co‐optation of local
community elites (Dzingirai), local government and
other policy elites(Madzwamuse) into the CBNRM
agenda shifting attention away from the re‐distributive
agenda demanded by the peasantries (Magome and
Murombedzi),
• and a guaranteeing of the rights of access of capital to
valuable natural resources and recreation
opportunities in agriculturally marginal communal
areas without necessarily improving the livelihoods of
the communities themselves (Bond, Murombedzi).

37. CBNRM and agrarian politics
• CBNRM programmes and the associated
discourse in southern Africa are decidedly
apolitical. There is little or no attempt to
research or interrogate the agrarian
structures characteristic of all the countries in
the region.

38. CBNRM and agrarian politics
• By addressing only limited resource tenure
reform issues and ignoring the historical
structural asymmetries in land ownership in
the bimodal agrarian structures of most of
East and Southern Africa, the CBNRM
discourse has also failed to identify the
struggles of the rural populations in these
regions for greater equity in land ownership
and participation in local governance

39. CBNRM and external interests
• Rural ‘communities’ in CBNRM typically have no
or limited access to the resource/s in question.
• Resources are typically managed by local
authorities, for commercial exploitation by
external interests with capital and political
influence.
• Communities themselves cannot organize
themselves into commercial interests for the
exploitation of these same resources

41. CBNRM Initiatives are top‐down
processes
• Without exception, all the CBNRM programmes
in the region are top‐down initiatives.
• Many of them originate in wildlife and forestry
departments, and are closely linked to
conservation and protected areas management
agendas.
• While governments put in place the policies for
devolution, civil society has become the main
driver of CBNRM in southern Africa.

42. CBNRM initiatives are top down
processes
• Many of the programmes and policies are
developed by donors and NGOs with the
collaboration and support of central government.
• Many of the demands for policy reform to
facilitate CBNRM are made by NGOs, with donor
funding, than by the local communities that
would benefit from the implementation of these
programmes.
• These policy initiatives are thus responding not to
the demands of communities, but to the CBNRM
lobby dominated by conservation NGOs.

43. Conclusions
• CBNRM has tended to constitute minimalist
attempts to reinvent communal property rights
without challenging the large‐scale redistribution
of property rights that was achieved by
colonialism in this region.
• Yet the long‐term impact of colonialism was to
turn natural resources into liabilities rather than
assets for the communities.
• The CBNRM programmes have devolved only
limited rights to these resources, while retaining
this colonial disempowerment

44. Conclusions
• What is required in order to turn the communal areas’
natural resources into assets in southern Africa is an
overhaul of the entitlements system through a more
holistic review of the distribution of property rights which
aims at achieving greater racial equity in the overall
distribution of land and resource rights,
• as well as at reforming the communal lands and native
reserves away from their current labour reserve status into
productive entities.
• In many ways, such an exercise is already underway
through the different land reform programs of the region.
CBNRM must thus make alliances and linkages with the
agrarian reform processes, and not remain delinked from
these transformation projects

45. Operationalization of resource rights
• In the absence of land reform in CBNRM,
communities have not been able to effectively
exercise their limited resource rights.
• This has led to the question: “when do rights
in law become rights in reality?” Cousins
(1997).

46. Making rights real
The minimal steps necessary towards the
realization of such rights include
– setting up of land registration system,
– establishment of decentralized local structures
responsible for the management of land rights, and;
– the development of mechanisms for the resolution of
land tenure related disputes.