Community Land Tenure and Adaptive Landscape Management as Climate Smart Options: Arguing Resilience of Alternate Land Systems in Nagaland, India
Pranab Ranjan Choudhury
Significant portion of the land in the abodes Indigenous people (IP) comprising one fifth of the worldds territory, is governed under customary law. Inhabited in some of richest yet fragile ecosystems, IP have demonstrated restrain and ingenuity in effectively protecting them, many times better than those maintained under formal systems. Their decentralized local institutions as well as a culture of conservation have ensured sustainable natural resources management, well complimented by the local ecological knowledge (LEK) systems which gets enriched through continuous, adaptive innovations. This paper presents land governance in Nagaland, India, where communities own 92% of land through un-codified customary laws. However, a strong community-control with tenure arrangements linked to landscape and use, has been able to provide space for a dynamic and innovative climate smart landscape management. Shifting cultivation, practiced by all the tribes over half of the area, is the culture, livelihoods and major food production system. A combination of tenure and interconnected traditional knowledge system, have enabled this practice to adapt to the biophysical and socio-economic changes and also to transform to conservation-oriented land use with high mitigation potential. This demonstrates the potential resilience of such alternate systems to effectively locally respond to global changes.
Event: Annual World Bank Conference on Land and Poverty 2015
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