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

1.2. Levels of involvement of external cooperation

Local Level

Specific to each country, this level has been varyingly established dependent up on State presence and the areas of influence of autochthonous authority. The 'village' serves as the rule of thumb for local action, in Senegal, village overlapping committees have a great influence, a blue-print does not exist (Rochette 1993:10, Tobisson 1992:16). Thus it should be very exactly checked which is the appropriate local level on which land tenure power can be strengthened or redistributed. Here there is a decisive interface between land tenure and the decentralising of State power (Hesseling/Ba 1993:45).

In close collaboration with the administration, which should encourage and defend long-term local initiatives for land use planning after the withdrawal of external donors, the following should be strived for (Coulibaly 1991:39, Crowley 1991, Lawry 1989a, Rochette 1993:24):

• 'Resuscitation' of the idea of administering common village land as room for varying utilization forms (terroir).

• Re-recognition and strengthening of the power of the community and to administrate the land according to certain own rules while still respecting national laws.

• Strengthening the leadership and decision making competence of local committees.

• The raising of management potential in particular the use of common resources since their degradation is currently recognised as the most critical factor.

• Support of implementing of decisions (technical help in the narrowest understanding, e.g. the drawing up of maps, plans and registers).

• Promoting harmonious and cooperative relations with State offices so that in an emergency, according to the subsidiary principle, they can enforce rules and sanctions which local authorities are no longer in a position to enforce, e.g. limiting the property rights of non-local users.

Every imaginable system of ownership is included in village land use: (individual) private ownership of farming lands, crop residues and animals, common ownership in village groves, grazing land or flood plains, and State land in the case of roads, public constructions or also classified forests. At the same time, it would be a romantic simplification only to concentrate on the community strategies for resource maintenance. In an economised world, in the village environment as well, strong economic incentives must encourage the individual to still take part in common resource management.

Village land use planning is thus embedded in the support of

• a socio-professional organisation (support of self-help groups),

• production techniques which are adapted to the agro-economic conditions and protect resources (agricultural research),

• private enterprises,

• decentralised State administration and services,

• disadvantaged actors, frequently women, who more and more are fighting for property rights (Hesseling/Ba 1993:19); young people and livestock owners.

National Level

It is unanimously agreed that external support alone, meaning experts as Government advisers with technical equipment, can have little effect on land legislation reform in view of the challenges which reach beyond sectors and institutions. Rather more it is necessary to spread the view of the problems amongst the State actors involved in Ministries (and the Legislative), i.e. to improve the flow of information and to dismantle well-worn sector oriented models of negotiation. Resource degradation problems do not do us the favour of letting themselves be split up and ordered according to subject and department. A reformed legislative framework is only as worth so much as incentive and motivation can also be created on a national level, for example through functional interministerial work groups which give it life and carry out its implementation.

This will be alleviated when, for example, a sector encompassing the Ministry of the Environment has already taken up its work. In the face of unclear or still to be fought out areas of competence, the strategy in this new Ministry might be to work on an overall control which encompasses urban as well as rural problems. The skilful integration of competing Ministries (Rural Development, Finance) is decisive.

Resource protection also fails when the models for negotiating and behaviour of the parties do not change. Participatory initiatives for the administration of State forests also will have been for nought if the forest administration does not rethink and qualify its repressive and one-sided defence oriented behaviour (Lawry 1989). Only when these changes in thinking and administrative action in centralist systems already begin with those involved in the Ministerial bureaucracy can a long and mid-term potential can arise also at the local level.

An autonomous field of activity for development cooperation, which must be introduced as a central point at the national level right at the initial phase, is the furtherance of decentralising initiatives.

Decentralising

Land tenure reforms and decentralising must be communally dealt with (Hesseling/Ba 1993). Decentralising of State responsibility as a prerequisite for locally efficient land tenure institutions and resource protection are being called for, and indeed verbally, by development organisations and also representatives of African States, but without a doubt it conceals an enormous amount of politically explosive material. There is great resistance within the administrative apparatus to relinquishing of power, for example in Mali (Coulibaly 1991).

The situation of interests of the actors involved towards decentralised structures is already diverse and ought to be made transparently clear in each individual case by external counselling. 'Physicists' see an opportunity for unloading costs from the national level onto regional administrative bodies; politically thinking decision makers (and donors) recognise a chance to win back the trust of the population and to enter into dialogue with it; the population itself recognises its new power and new might in being able to administrate its local patrimony autonomously (Hesseling/Ba 1993, Rochette 1993).

Typically enough, the more recent discussion about property rights and resource preservation always orients itself towards the poles of 'local' and 'national' levels. And typically enough the preparation workshop for the conference for land tenure problems and the decentralising of the OECD,CILSS and the Club du Sahel in Spring 1994 is drawing itself to this area through the formation of two separated circles of work (OECD et al. 1993).

In a phase of cautious and uncertain sounding out of many States about concrete forms of decentralised exercising power, also determined by the pressure of the donors, CILSS and the Club du Sahel see their function first and foremost in the presentation of models and their advantages and disadvantages (OECD et al. 1993, Rochette 1993):

• The creating of legal bases, whereby open laws of orientation are also pleaded for; permitting a larger leeway in the gaining of experience locally.

• The clarification of the complexity of decentralising programs and their political implications: new laying down of levels of territorial administration, taxes, police and jurisprudence according to the subsidiary principle including the capacity t of municipalities to fix contracts on its own with external donors.

• The dangers of overtaxing of the institutional capacity of a thus far centralised State in the implementation of decentralisation: therefore a step-by-step action and a limitation at a maximum of two levels for example village and municipality (commune, canton) is proposed.

There already exists a precise field of cooperation in the setting up of land registries and topographical Offices and the province level, through which not only the legal security of resources is increased, but tax revenue can also be raised.

Such initiatives have a pilot character and must be embedded in more comprehensive programs. Their conception will only be possible when, revealed and motivated by external process consulting, basic positions are layed down by the national organisations: decentralising through the relinquishing of financial sovereignty, decisions of the fixing of units, village, municipalities, etc., the securing of legal responsibility and models of financial compensation between the regional administrative bodies.