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While trekking through the forests of Indonesia Borneo far from any urban center, the sound of insects, mammals, reptiles, and the roaring river can be deafening. It is a testament to the forest’s immense biodiversity—some of which is found nowhere else in the world. Yet no more than a few kilometers away, the forests open up to an expanse of oil palm trees that stretch to the horizon, neatly planted in rows like corn fields in central Indiana. This stark contrast in landscapes masks the tension around land ownership and land use in Indonesia Borneo that has lasted for several decades. Market forces fueled by policies that catalyzed demand for oil palm led to targeted increases in the production of oil palm. This led the way for international conglomerates to purchase hundreds of thousands of acres for oil palm production. But the lands being targeted for oil palm production were oftentimes occupied by local Dayak communities and others who have lived in the forests of Indonesia Borneo for generations, many of which settled the area there long before land titles. Indeed, in the 1980s, the Indonesian government recognized longstanding settlements and arranged systems whereby villagers could arrange a profit-sharing agreement with organizations interested in cultivating and developing the land in exchange for transferring development rights. But as an extensive New York Times piece (Lustgarten, 2018) documented, “companies often secured the permits they needed through some combination of intense lobbying, bribery and strong-arming, and the result was broken promises and missing payments.” Villagers lacked the resources or institutional knowledge of how to defend their rights. Due in part to the power differential between villagers and international conglomerates and the enormous demand for oil palm, 16,000 square miles of rainforest have been lost since 1973, which accounts for approximately 20% of deforestation in impacted areas (Gaveau et al., 2016). The overall socioeconomic impact of oil palm expansion remains difficult to generalize (Sheil et al., 2009), but increasing evidence suggests land ownership and land use remains central to concerns, conflict, and debate about increasing oil palm production and who ultimately benefits (Rist et al., 2010).

On the other side of the world in the Middle Belt region of Nigeria, National Public Radio (McDonnell, 2018a) reported a vicious cycle of retaliatory attacks between permanent farming communities and the nomadic pastoralist Fula that has persisted for years. Amnesty International (2018) suggests a primary cause stems from disputes over access and ownership over water, land, and pasture, resulting in over 3600 people killed from January 2016 to October 2018. Recent shifts by farmers to dry season farming, population growth, and shifting livelihood strategies by both herders and farmers increased demand for natural resources. Water, for instance, was needed by farmers for irrigation and by herders for their livestock in the same season. Prior to these changes, traditional agreements between farmers and herders largely prevented conflict, and when conflicts did occur, they were quickly resolved. Individual herders lacked land rights and instead utilized communal lands, and herders also received permission to graze livestock in areas that were not being used for agriculture by farmers. In response to increasing conflicts, some state governments instituted restricted grazing to enclosed ranchland (McDonnell, 2018b). This did little to stem conflict, however, as many herders were unable to comply because they relied on communal lands that were not enclosed and also did not own any land. In return, the policy has been attributed with an increase in fatalities as, “The grazing laws pushed people to a level where they really felt like they had to fight, especially in rural areas where there is no presence of security” (McDonnell, 2018a).

A Common Thread Underpins Pressing Sustainability Challenges

The cases above illustrate how land tenure security (herein just tenure security) is an important factor for sustainable development. In these cases, tenure insecurity is both a primary and underlying issue exacerbating other pressures that create conflict and uncertainty for sustainable natural resource use or equitable development. In both cases, clarifying land tenure is critical for resolving a diverse set of issues. The cases are by no means representative of the range of issues where tenure insecurity is either a primary or a tertiary exacerbating factor. But they highlight how tenure insecurity can intersect and is driven by historical inequities, political power and influence, population growth, economic development, and other factors. Ultimately, tenure security is important for resolving issues at local, regional, and global scales, although this may not always be immediately clear.

Take, for example, the case of Indonesia Borneo, which highlights how insecure tenure has created conditions for unsustainable and arguably inequitable development of the region. The cascading effects from insecure tenure have implications for climate change, biodiversity, and sustainable economic development at all scales. On the local scale, Indonesia Borneo’s forests are home to historic Dayak tribes and hold immense biodiversity. Borneo is one of the richest biodiversity regions in the world, and it is known as a global diversity “hotspot.” Beyond being home to the well-known orangutan, it is home to over 14,000 plant species, among which an estimated 28% are found nowhere else in the world (Roos et al., 2004). Dayak tribes have called Borneo home for hundreds of years, and the land, the forest, and everything on and below it hold cultural and spiritual significance and also play a critical role in daily life. For instance, an estimated 34% in the rural areas of Kalimantan reported forests as a source of traditional medicine to treat kidney disease, malaria, fever, and digestive problems (Abram et al., 2014). At the regional scale, insecure land tenure may have contributed to slashing and burning of peatland and forests (Lustgarten, 2018), which in just one year is estimated to have contributed to poor air quality and led to 100,000 premature deaths in Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore (Koplitz et al., 2016). On the global scale, forests and peatlands in Indonesia Borneo store significant amounts of carbon, and these lands are critical for meeting ambitious global climate change goals. Here again, fires can severely setback important climate change targets. To put this into perspective, the 1997 peat and forest fires contributed to the largest increase in carbon emissions since records began (Page et al., 2002), and the 2015 fires in Indonesia Borneo released so much carbon that the daily carbon emissions were more than that of the entire European Union (Huijnen et al., 2016).

Tenure security can affect a diverse set of issues at multiple scales, so it is perhaps unsurprising that it has grabbed the attention of conservationists, ecologists, climate scientists, women’s empowerment advocates, food security specialists, public health practitioners, and others. Tenure security is foundational for many global agendas, such as the Sustainable Development Goals, the Paris Agreement, and the Aichi Targets. As a result, tenure security is an explicit component of many policies and programs, such as Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation plus programs, establishment of protected areas, gender equity programs, and even sustainable agricultural programs that aim to decrease fertilizer runoff.

The interest of multiple stakeholders has led to significant growth in research on tenure security and has created a rich body of knowledge (Fig. 1.1). But it has also created fragmented research agendas and approaches to resolving land tenure insecurity. Fragmentation has occurred across disciplines (e.g., economics, geography, political economy) and policy interests (e.g., nature conservation, women’s empowerment). A lack of clarity in terminology (Schlager & Ostrom, 1992; van Gelder, 2010) has also created significant challenges (Masuda et al. 2020), such as inconsistent measurement, well-intentioned but poorly designed policies, and a multiplicity of theoretical frameworks. Given the complexity of tenure security, precise language and terminology is important for facilitating discussion and advancing knowledge.

Fig. 1.1
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Number of research articles for property rights and tenure security across time. Data were extracted from Scopus using the following search strings. For property rights, “(TITLE-ABS-KEY(("land" OR "lands") AND (("ownership right*" OR "property ownership" OR "property right*") OR ("property titl*" OR "titl*") OR ("land right*" OR "right*")) AND NOT "urban") AND PUBYEAR > 1949 AND (LIMIT-TO (DOCTYPE,"ar")) AND (LIMIT-TO (LANGUAGE,"English"))).” For land tenure security, “Your query: (TITLE-ABS-KEY(("land" OR "lands") AND (("tenure secur*" OR "tenure insecur*" OR "secure tenure" OR "insecur* tenure" OR "land tenure")) AND NOT "urban") AND PUBYEAR > 1949 AND (LIMIT-TO (DOCTYPE,"ar")) AND (LIMIT-TO (LANGUAGE,"English")))”

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Here, we provide descriptions and definitions of property rights, tenure form, institutions, and tenure security to facilitate consistent discussion on tenure security. These are all concepts that are important for understanding tenure security (Arnot et al., 2011; Robinson et al., 2018; van Gelder, 2010). Here, rights are “particular actions that are authorized,” and a property right is “the authority to undertake particular actions related to a specific domain” (p. 250, Schlager & Ostrom, 1992). Property rights include access, withdrawal, management, exclusion, alienation, and due process and compensation (Table 1.1). For example, often implicit in home ownership is the right to possess the property, control the property, make modifications, and exclude others from the land on which a home sits, among others. However, in (for example) the case of Sweden, the codified principle of Allmansrätten grants individuals the right of public access. Property rights also imply the duty to not exercise a right, such as a restriction on one’s own action as in the case of conservation easements on private land.

Table 1.1 Definition of rightsa
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Tenure form “determine[s] who can use what resources, for how long, and under what conditions” (FAO, 2002). Institutions are “the humanly devised constraints that structure political, economic and social interaction. They consist of both informal constraints (e.g., sanctions, taboos, customs, traditions, and codes of conduct), and formal rules (e.g., constitutions, laws, property rights)” (North, 1991). In essence, they are the “rules of the game” (North, 1990). Finally, land tenure security is a landholder’s perception that rights will be upheld by society (Sjaastad & Bromley, 2000). As a result, tenure security results from an interaction between these concepts, and is multidimensional. Below, we use these terms to provide a better understanding through a case study.

Maasai Communities Around the Foothills of Mount Kenya

In southwest Meru County at the foothills of Mount Kenya, several Maasai villages have lived communally for generations. The Maasai pastoralist culture has had to adapt to colonialism, economic and social development, globalization, and other forces. This shift has meant that recent generations have adopted a more semi-pastoralist way of life, having permanent settlements with some small-scale agriculture, all while maintaining pastoralist traditions. Cattle provide the main form of wealth for these communities, and a collectivist culture whose identity is centered on cattle and pastoralism still dictates individual behavior and community governance. Communal land for livestock grazing continues to provide an important resource for communities.

Agricultural plots farmed by the Maasai contain many individual-level property rights. Property boundaries are established, giving a household individual rights to access the plot, withdraw products grown there, manage the plot as the household sees fit, exclude others from trespassing, and divide and sell the plot if they so desire. This is typically seen as the “full” bundle of rights that come along with the tenure form private property (Table 1.1).

The Maasai communities also retain rights to designated communal grazing land. In the case of Maasai villages in southwest Meru County, several villages graze livestock on communal land. Cattle and other livestock move around these lands to take advantage of seasonality and variation in the production of grasses, which are largely driven by rainfall patterns. The Maasai also have many rights associated with these lands. At the individual level, each person has access and withdrawal rights on their designated land. At the community level, there is a collective right to management and exclusion of others from enjoying the benefits of the land. However, the right of alienation does not exist either individually or collectively. In 2016, the Kenyan government formally recognized community land via the Community Land Act, designating the tenure form of these grasslands as community or communal land.

Here, property rights are enforced by both informal and formal institutions. First, the informal institution relies on traditional village governance structures within the Maasai communities and is made up of village elders who have advanced through traditional Maasai warrior culture. This system consists of older villagers who have been initiated as warriors, practiced as young elders, and have since graduated to becoming village elders. Warriors are grouped by age-sets—or cohorts—and are initiated into adulthood at the same time. They form close bonds and perform community duties such as protecting cattle and community members. Decisions involve all village elders through discussion about the infraction and appropriate penalty, and expectations are established via long-held social and cultural norms, and warriors are often tasked with enforcing punishments if needed. In this way, grassland tenure is socially upheld from within the community and with tacit or explicit support from other surrounding communities. The formal institution here is the state, as it bestows and enforces property rights through the Kenyan Community Land Act. Both these institutions can work together to provide assurances that society (either socially, at the local level, or statutorily, at the governmental level) will uphold these rights. Yet the institutions at the local level and the ones provided by the state can be unequal, and the Maasai communities largely use these informal or socially-upheld institutions to give landholders longer-term assurance over their rights, which provides tenure security.

Societal change, economic development, climate change, demographic change, changing cultural preferences, and other forces will likely test the resilience of property rights, the institutions that uphold and enforce them, and the Maasai communities’ tenure security. For instance, unpredictable rainfall patterns have, in recent years, caused drought in neighboring pastoralist communities, resulting in decreased grass production. This threatened the health of cattle and other livestock, and as a result neighboring communities encroached on Maasai communal land as they searched for healthier pastures to feed their livestock. This event tested the strength of the Maasai community’s informal institution, as it only provide tenure security as long as it is respected and adhered to by those within communal land boundaries. Recent migrants who were unfamiliar with and may not have respected or adhered to the existing informal institution can create conflict by breaking the existing social contract. In practice, elders from both the Maasai communities and the encroaching communities met to resolve the dispute, although skirmishes still occurred as information about the agreement took time to disseminate across the community. This event highlights how, in some ways, tenure is broadly secure through informal institutions and federally recognized land, and in theory there is an arbitration system that can deal with land disputes. In other ways, there are numerous ways in which tenure is insecure, which can prevent landholders from making land management decisions that involve long-term strategies or land investments.

Definitions Affect How We Analyze Issues and Develop Solutions

As demonstrated above, tenure security is complex, and the way in which we talk about the factors affecting it is critical for developing a consistent understanding of its drivers, its effects, and ways to resolve tenure insecurity. Providing clarity in descriptions and definitions is a first step, but the real world presents complex situations where understanding, for instance, how property rights intersect with the enforcement of property rights by informal and formal institutions is more than just acknowledging these are linked concepts. Further, the cases highlight how tenure security is connected to seemingly unrelated or distant issues. The primary effects of drought in a neighboring community (i.e., decreased biomass from a lack of rain impacting cattle and livestock health) may have been exacerbated by tenure insecurity in the Maasai communities. This is because droughts also affected neighboring pastoralist communities, and searching for more grazing land, these communities encroached on Maasai village communal land, thus creating greater land use pressure that expedited the degradation of communal grasslands. With stronger institutions that allow enforcement of property rights to exclude outside community members, the effects of the drought may have been minimized.

The following chapters use the terms outlined above to ensure a consistent discussion about tenure security and sustainable development. This book, collectively, is about showcasing how land tenure and secure rights over land are fundamental to many of the most basic tenants of human well-being and environmental sustainability. We hope to help illuminate the foundational role that tenure security plays in development and how it connects to many of the contemporary issues we struggle with today.

Starting from fundamental tenants and taking a long view of history, Chaps. 1, 2 and 3 aim to show the broad societal-level factors and determinants of tenure security. This comes through a review of terms with illustrative examples (this chapter), a view of the historical evolution of land rights (Chap. 2), and a perspective on how legal and customary rights are both needed for tenure security (Chap. 3). The core of this book, Chaps. 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 and 10, focus on how tenure security interacts with contemporary topical issues, while Chaps. 11, 12 and 13 summarize potential ways to address tenure insecurity. In these chapters, in some cases tenure security may affect the Chapter topic itself (e.g., insecure land tenure can create conflict). In other cases, tenure security might mitigate how a particular issue affects social and conservation outcomes of interest (e.g., how tenure security interacts with conservation programs). Finally, Chaps. 14 and 15 synthesize across these issues to discuss new and emerging directions for research and practice.