Michael Kirk (1996):
The Role of Land Tenure and Property Rights in Sustainable Resource Use: The Case of Benin

4. Problems of land tenure and sustainable resource management in Benin

4.1. Basic environmental problems today

The Environmental Action Plan gives eight fundamental reasons for the environmental crisis of the country. Two of those explicitly relate land tenure and the preservation of resources:

1) The insecurity with regards to property rights in land and other natural resource.

2) A lack of respect for existing laws and State regulations as well as a lack of means to enforce their application.

Insecurity of land tenure denotes nowadays to the living conditions of agriculturalists and livestock owners. It is one reason for the lack of investment in land improveving measures and the protection of the natural patrimony. It needs to be explained how this insecurity is expressed by various actors and where it has its roots. Obviously their autochthonous environmentally relevant institutions are no longer sufficiently in the position to be able to fulfil their functions without state legislation acting as a substitute. Lacking or weak central authorities and their enforcement mechanisms may well be the reason. The following cases (see 4.2.) demonstrate these mechanisms in various regions of the country.

Three further causes of environmental problems indirectly touch upon property rights and resource utilization:

3) inappropriateness and splitting up of structures for an environmental management,

4) lacking regional policy and strategies for spatial planning,

5) lacking quality and motivation of public services for a successful environmental management.

Local producers ascribe in particular to the state parties, responsible for agricultural policy and services in farming, animal husbandry, forestry and technical infrastructure, fundamental responsibility for the observed degradation of the environment. Examples are the one-sided orientation towards cotton with all its land tenure problems and polluting effects, the systematic neglect of property rights of mobile livestock owners or the partially rigid stance, sometimes marked by bribery, of the forest administration towards neighbouring users.