Room
for Manoeuvre: Local Organisations and Resource Tenure Administration in
Highland Kafa, Southwest Ethiopia
Yihenew
Zewdie
Abstract:
The role of local organisations in tenure administration is examined, giving
particular emphasis to past and present processes of forest law enforcement and
settlement of forest use-related disputes in highland Kafa, Ethiopia. The
involvement of local rural organisations in tenure administration is mainly a
consequence of the 1975 Land Reform Proclamation. Recently community-initiated
local organisations have become increasingly involved in dispute settlement
along with state-sponsored ones. This has in turn created the conditions for a
synergetic relationship between these organisations in tenure administration.
Ineffectual forest legislation and limited government capacity to implement the
tenurial provisions have, inadvertently, allowed local organisations to adopt
tenure rules to suit local interests, which at times tended to favour the
powerful and disregarded forest conservation imperatives. It is argued that
tenure administration should aim at sustainability and equitability, and these
necessitate enactment of livelihood-oriented forest tenure reform that builds
upon and reinvigorates local institutional capital.
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