Forest tenure reform implementation in Uganda: What lessons for policy and practice?

Purpose:

Over the past decade or more land and forest tenure reforms in Africa, Asia and Latin America have provided greater legal recognition of local, customary, indigenous territorial rights and women’s rights. However, implementation of these reforms has been uneven and has led to mixed results, including increasing tenure insecurity.

In order to better understand reform implementation and to generate insights for policy and practice, the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR) together with partners in Uganda, Indonesia and Peru initiated a research and action project in 2014 intended to:

1. Establish how forest tenure reforms emerge, and document experiences and options for formal approaches to securing tenure rights for forest adjacent communities.
2. Identify impacts of tenure reform on rights and access of women, poor men and ethnic minorities to forests and trees
3. Identify factors that constrain support for reform and its implementation
4. Disseminate lessons learned and knowledge generated at sub-national, national, regional and international levels.

In Uganda, the work was conducted by Makere University and the Association of Uganda Professional Women in Agriculture and Environment (AUPWAE) in three districts: Kibaale, Lamwo and Masindi.

This multi-stakeholder colloquium is aimed at sharing lessons learned from the research and action conducted in Uganda to stimulate debate over these lessons, to identify how they might be integrated into ongoing and future initiatives and to identify emerging issues.

Objectives:

1. Provide feedback to the stakeholders regarding the findings of the study
2. Facilitate multi-stakeholder discussions on various aspects of forest tenure reforms implementation
3. Generate some recommendations for improving forest tenure reform implementation in Uganda as well as securing tenure rights of local communities

Further reading:

• Gender, tenure and community forests in Uganda
• Land tenure and livelihoods: What’s the connection?
• Moving the needle: Advancing gender equality in Uganda
• Gender relations in community forestry
• Land tenure in forests a matter of food security, experts contend

Related project site:

• https://www.cifor.org/gcs-tenure/

Donors: