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EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: "In recent years, many governments globally have formally recognized community land and natural resource tenure, either based on existing customary practices or more recently established land governance arrangements.1 These tenure arrangements have been called by a variety of names, such as community, customary, communal, collective, indigenous, ancestral, or native land rights recognition. In essence, they seek to establish the rights of a group to obtain joint tenure security over their community’s land. This approach is not necessarily limited to use by those communities that largely manage their lands solely on a communal or collective basis, because it can encompass individualized arrangements within it. In fact, recognizing the boundary of all lands held by a community, and then allowing the community itself to define individual rights within that community land boundary, can be much more cost-effective (Deininger, 2003). Neither is it an approach solely used by indigenous, ancestral, or native communities, because any rural community with established occupation of their lands can potentially be eligible for such protections. We use the term “community land and resource tenure” because many community-based forms of tenure encompass a range of different land use types, including permanent agricultural land, shifting or swidden cultivation areas, forests, grazing areas, and water bodies. The Voluntary Guidelines on the Responsible Governance of Tenure of Land, Fisheries, and Forests in the Context of National Food Security, established in 2012, affirm the importance of recognizing and respecting all legitimate tenure rights holders and their rights, whether formally recorded or not (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations [FAO], 2012). This includes indigenous peoples (IP) and other communities with customary tenure systems that exercise self-governance of land, fisheries, and forests...
