John W. Bruce, Mark S. Freudenberger and Tidiane Ngaido (1995):
Old Wine in New Bottles:

6.3 Problems in the system

The tenure debate in The Gambia is largely centered on the rather unique land-tenure dynamics unfolding in the Greater Banjul area. When the topic of tenure and property rights is brought up in governmental and nongovernmental forums, the discussion usually focuses on the problems of urban land speculation, conflicting ownership claims, and contentious court cases taking place in the peri-urban areas around Banjul. Disputes about the use of land in the Kombo Saint Mary region are indeed rampant, though this is not the subject of this report.

A recent official Working Group on Resource Tenure and Land Use Planning (see Freudenberger, Sheehan, and Working Group 1994) found that tenure on holdings used for field-crop cultivation is fairly secure for primary rights holders. Primary rights accrue to descendants of founding families or those closely associated with these lineages through marriage or political alliance. People with firm primary rights to land face no constraints in planting trees, constructing soil conservation devices, or otherwise making permanent investments in the land. Customary land-tenure arrangements in our case studies are still very strong and are protected by the legal system. National land law in The Gambia currently respects customary land-tenure traditions; the district tribunals play a critically important role in maintaining the system through their conflict-resolution prerogatives.

People possessing "secondary" rights to land face varying degrees of tenure insecurity and limitations on what they can do with the land. Women and men from land-borrowing families may not have the same security of access to resources as those from the founding families. A wide variety of arrangements allow borrowing and lending of land between founding families and newer arrivals. Founding families retain the right to revoke land loans and, as one case study showed, this may even apply to lands lent hundreds of years ago.

Land tenure problems in the holdings are particularly acute when land suddenly acquires new value. At that particular moment, various interest groups struggle to control the land-allocation process. The practice of jockeying for exclusive control and the renegotiation of the rules of the game are often conflictive. This dynamic is no more evident than in large-scale irrigation projects in The Gambia.

The Working Group case studies and other literature suggest that one of the central tenure and natural resource problems in The Gambia is the management of the village commons. These are forests, mangrove swamps, salt flats, grazing areas, and watercourses that are controlled by neither households nor lineages but "belong" in a vaguely defined sense to one or more villages. Village commons in The Gambia are very important sources of firewood, construction materials, thatching materials, fruits and nuts, medicinal plants, fish and wild game, and pastures for both rural and urban populations. Women and economically marginal people are especially dependent on the collection of forest products for sale in urban and rural markets.

In contrast to land controlled by households and lineages, property rights in the commons are often poorly articulated and enforced. In some cases an open-access situation exists where few if any rules regulate the use of the natural resources. At times government and rural communities insist that particular resources of the commons be governed by statutory or customary laws, but in reality no authority enforces the statutes or traditional covenants. For this reason, a wide variety of resource user groups may have free reign to extract the products of the commons.

Sustainable management of such degraded resources like the commons may be facilitated if both state and local community authority structures clarify the multiple and overlapping rights and responsibilities of the many resource user groups that depend on these important forest, range, and water resources for their livelihood. This entails most often the creation of common-property regimes out of open-access situations. Yet in several cases the issue is to clarify the respective role of the state versus the local community over the use and sustainable management of the commons.

Populations living around forest parks have little sense of ownership or stewardship of the state reserve. In the Kiang West and Upper Baddibu case studies, the forest parks are perceived to be state owned and managed and thus not worthy of care by local populations. Villagers are certainly very much aware of excessive exploitation of the park (and they partake of it in many cases), but they do not try to stop abusive practices because they believe that this responsibility lies with the state.

Research in other parts of West Africa suggests that communities have the capacity and willingness to manage resources when they view them as their own and when they derive appreciable benefits from the invested time and effort in resource conservation. The experiment by the Gambian-German Forestry Project in Foni Brefet suggests that people are very interested in managing forests for the benefit of the broader community. Similar observations were made in Dankunko, where strong district leadership led to strict control on the use of forest resources. The government can play a very important role in establishing institutions and mechanisms to foster participatory management of state reserves.