Land tenure, governance, and payments for ecosystem services
Term: October 2009-September 2010
Funding: USAID-Translinks
People: PI: Lisa Naughton, Communications director: Kurt Brown, Susana Lastarria, Maggie Holland, Manolo Morales.
Participating institutions: LTC.
Summary:Payments for ecosystem services (PES) offer the opportunity to directly reward local citizens for protecting forests, watersheds and biodiversity. Yet it is often difficult to identify the appropriate beneficiaries due to uncertain or contested land claims. Land tenure is particularly problematic at development frontiers, where forests are rich in biodiversity and carbon, but people are poor. Policy interventions related to land tenure are often controversial and/or costly. We aim to better inform policy on PES (particularly REDD) through the activities below.
Products:
- New LTC policy brief on land tenure and related terms. Using as a starting point LTC Brief 1, ?Review of Tenure Terminology,? by John Bruce, 1998, we will update and expand the brief by including terms and concepts most relevant to PES. The output (in English and Spanish), will be pitched toward the needs of policymakers, and will inform WCS and TransLinks collaborator Forest Trends? activity of creating a PES training curriculum.
- In collaboration with the environmental NGO Ecolex, we will produce an expanded report on tenure and forests in Ecuador, ?Guidelines on Tenure Interventions,? offering guidance on interventions for policymakers and donors working in the region. This will contribute to the PES training curriculum.
- Produce a synthesis of literature on the effect of land tenure on deforestation, with an emphasis on Latin American cases. This will result in a publication and annotated bibliography.
- Test the effect of land tenure arrangements on deforestation and poverty in eight cantons of Ecuador. This will result in a publication.