Property rights can be held by private entities or by the state, and by an individual or a group. Property rights experts generally identify four basic kinds of tenure or ownership (FAO 2002:8):
- Private, or owned by an individual, corporation, or institution;
- Communal, or owned in common by a defined group of individuals, such as a village, tribe, or commune;
- State, or owned by the government;
- Open access, or owned by no one.
The term “communal” has been used to cover a plethora of ownership situations, ranging from resources that can be used by virtually anyone (more accurately described as open-access) to resources that are used simultaneously or serially by multiple users, such as land on which all community members have grazing rights or traditional fishing grounds where they can fish. It also applies to tenure arrangements in which ownership is vested in the community, which in turn allocates land or other resources among households for cultivation, resource extraction, and other uses. Communal tenure systems thus may encompass strong household and individual rights to use a particular resource or parcel of land, often passed down by inheritance through a family. In fact, holding exclusive use-rights in a traditional, community-based tenure system can be as secure as private, individually titled property rights in Western countries (Rukuni 1999:4). (See Figure 3.1 The Importance Of Community-Owned Forests.)
Property rights regimes involving significant communal control over land or resource use have been the prevailing land tenure arrangements in Africa and Asia for centuries. More recently, however, European colonial powers introduced the western concept of private, individual property. In colonial Africa, both the British and the French created enclaves of individually owned property in urban areas as well as white settler farms, but only cautiously expanded the concept of individually titled property to selected Africans (Bruce 2000:17). Among West African countries, individualized tenure often appeared in tandem with the introduction of cash crops for export (Elbow et al. 1998:5).
Contrary to the belief of some Western observers, communally owned resources (which are a form of common pool resources) are not inevitably subject to overuse and destruction— the so-called “tragedy of the commons” popularized by Garrett Hardin in his scholarly article in 1968 (Hardin 1968). Hardin’s thesis—that natural resources held in common will inevitably be overused—more accurately pertains to open-access resources rather than to communally owned and managed resources.With open-access resources, such as ocean fisheries in international waters or state forests where the government presence is weak or absent, all potential users have equal access to the resource and none can be excluded. In contrast, in well-functioning communal tenure situations, the community itself is able to exclude outsiders from using the resource and to enforce norms of behavior—such as fishing or grazing limits—for its own members’ resource use (Ostrom et al. 1999:278).
Recent research has shown that community-based tenure systems can be quite compatible with sustainable resource use under the right conditions. For instance, a study of two Guatemalan communities, Las Cebollas and Moran, found that when community members perceive a resource as both necessary and scarce, they invest in efforts to protect it from overuse (Jensen 2000:641). In Jordan, herder cooperatives with management rights on their traditional pastures are achieving higher range productivity than state-managed reserves, without requiring expensive fencing and guarding (Ngaido and McCarthy 2004:1).
