Managing the Miombo Woodlands of Southern Africa Policies, incentives and options
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3.4History counts when attitudes matter!The new resource tenure frameworks developed in the last few years were not introduced in an historical vacuum. The legacy of an authoritarian past has left profound attitudinal imprints on both rural populations and on the government administration. In the first instance, given the often capricious and arbitrary exercise of power under previous undemocratic arrangements, many citizens have generally low levels of trust in the authorities and may not be willing to take risks and challenges associated with taking up opportunities that the new institutional environment offers. Such reluctance is likely to be felt more in areas that suffered more acute experiences of the more authoritarian strands of colonial and post-independence administrations; furthermore, many edifices of state power largely remain. In the second instance, it means that the state authorities continued to be managed by an administrative and technical cadre that has been trained and habituated to top-down management processes. Given the recent legacy of a centralized state, many of the officials still feel uncomfortable with new ways of doing business other than the command and control ways they have been used to. Thus, the institutionalization of community based forest management initiatives takes much more than just the mapping, re-aligning and registering of land rights. History counts when attitudes matter, with the catch being that there tends to be more reluctance to engage in more democratic systems of resource management in areas that suffered the hitherto existing non-democratic exercise of power most. Hence, institutionalisation of community based forestry management initiatives may require much more than just reforming legislation and putting in place the implementation arrangements. The process transcends the purely legal to the attitudinal and facilitative, including civic education, capacity building, and most importantly perhaps, recognizing that change will be slow and incremental rather than profound. For instance, a recent report on Chipange Chetu by Mubai et al, (2006) showed that it was not until 2001, when payments from the hunting concession were first made to the community groups that they began to feel and exercise any real sense of ownership over the project. In a related case from Coutada 9, benefits had already started flowing to the communities even before the resource management initiative had been formalised. It is equally interesting that in the case of Coutada 9, the resource flows have actually preceded formalisation in the conventional sense, with a series of agreements struck that have as their basis, once again, a careful process of negotiation and trust-building. An argument is made that the issue of trust is of critical importance given that administrative discretion remains a key element in the implementation of land and resource legislation and that government sector agencies and actors are the main agents of delivery of such discretion. The administrative structure bestowing wide discretionary oversight to state officials in regulating access to land and resources has to be trusted by the citizens if it is to secure the goodwill and cooperation required for community based forest management initiatives to succeed. The poor will continue to be circumspect about occupying spaces opened up by new pro-people reforms for as long as such people do not trust actors seen as drivers of such reforms. Further, anything other than full commitment and engagement by the poor communities will only serve to provide avenues for rent-seeking behaviour by those administering the process, which in turn will tend to favour the politically or economically powerful and also about policy credibility the relevance of incentives. This is illustrated by the Chipange Chetu case study in section 4. The evolution of community based forest management in Mozambique has shown the importance of also having the right policy and legal framework. In Moore’s words the framework provides an ‘appropriate space’ within which claims can be acknowledged and pursued. Coming up with the framework is key since the formal and legal redefinition of rights and status may always come later through learning-by-doing adjustments that are made to improve practice as policy gets implemented. By their very nature, community based natural resource management initiatives are social learning experiments. The process begins with an open and participatory policy and legislative process that results in an imaginative law with a high level of legitimacy. Such a process accords many flexible routes to formalization, and is best followed by the use of this philosophical and legal space (by NGOs, communities, local people and their private sector partners) to pursue new economic initiatives with emerging experiences being fortified to sustain community gains. Real empowerment does not end with simply adjusting the legal environment per se but through sustained efforts to remove the impediments that may detract from the attainment of more thoroughgoing empowerment. Thus Mozambique is characterized by the experiments and initiatives in the countryside, with deals and frameworks for resource use being negotiated and benefits beginning to flow to the rural poor, than by any serious moves to systematically implement the more standard formalization of rights in accordance with the law. The point is that the Land Law and the process leading to its adoption has opened up an important space for formalization, a space within which the informal rights of the poor are recognized and given a new legitimacy without needing to be strictly defined or forced into a rigid formal context. These rights are beginning to be taken seriously and are becoming less susceptible to challenge because they have been given a broader legitimacy within the law, rather than because of their transformation into a ‘formal’ rights framework. Nevertheless, this process is taking place within a context of rising demand for land, enclosures, and signs of land concentration in which local rights in many places are not being imaginatively used as described above. More efforts and resources are required to get invisible legal rights on to official maps and records. My argument does not disguise this need, but rather underlines the fact that registration is just part of a broader package of formalizing measures and strategies that can secure tenure for the poor and promote the equitable process of land occupation and use foreseen in the original 1995 Land Policy. Box 2 highlights some of the tenurial changes that need to take place to align forest management, timber production in particular, towards community needs in order to reduce poverty through sustainable forest management.
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