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Emerging Community Tenure Systems and Forest Resource Extraction Beginning in the Fall of 2000 Conservation Clinic Director Tom Ankersen and University of Florida Geomatics Professor Grenville Barnes began researching emerging land tenure models within common property regimes that engage in forest resource extraction. We chose case studies from the Brazilian Amazon (extractive reserves) and the Maya Forest of Guatemala (community forest concessions) and Mexico (forest ejidos in Quintanaroo). We found that within the communally owned or managed "polygon" - the outside property boundary of communal lands recognized as such by the national property registry - community members are formally and informally unpacking the "bundle of rights" encompassed within the common law notion of "fee simple" title to real property, known as dominion pleno in the civil law tradition of most of Latin America. We learned of various forest management proposals that seemed analogous to models of western property interests such as conservation easements (servidumbres ecologicas), transferable development (deforestation) rights and tenure class reassignment. We concluded that the increasing sophistication of these unbundling proposals may warrant a concomitant increase in the sophistication of record keeping, especially where the rights being transferred are intergenerational. We concluded that it may be appropriate in some instances to consider the creation of community land information systems, whether or not they are formally tied to the national registry. We presented our research at the international conference entitled "Working Forests in the Tropics," held at the University of Florida in February of 2002. The results of our research are provided below. Resources:
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