Who is the ‘community’?
11 2. COMMONS AND THE GUIDELINES
by the indigenous or customary community, and the diferent members of this community may hold multiple and overlapping bundles of tenure rights to the
common resource. In another situation, diferent communities may negotiate and agree on allocating certain bundles of rights to parts of the resources to members
of the diferent communities for permanent or temporary collective use.
However, in many cases, governments withhold the authority normally associated with ownership. This makes them unduly empowered to determine how the
resources are used or to issue commercial use rights in the form of concessions for logging, mining, industrial agriculture and ranching on the customarily held
commons. In other cases, governments retain important management rights, which often leads to over-regulation of use and high barriers and costs to legally
use common resources.
• Commons may be newly established where groups e.g. forest user groups come together to create rules and norms to use, manage and even own a
speciic natural resource collectively. Such groups may also build a cooperative or an association to utilize the resource collectively and organize and carry out
production as a collective. These commons may also be subject to the scenarios described above under the irst two bullet points.
To secure tenure rights to commons and support the collective action needed to sustain common resources, it is crucial to devolve rights and responsibilities to govern
the commons to local groups or communities and recognize their collective tenure rights see Chapter 2.2 on why it is important to secure tenure rights to commons.
Hence the challenge for legislation and law implementation is to account for the complexity, diversity and lexibility of the bundles of tenure rights to commons, and
to recognize the rights and responsibilities of groups or communities to govern these rights.
2. Who is the ‘community’?
What constitutes a group or ‘community’ varies by region and country, by circumstance and by the nature of the resource involved. For the purposes of this
guide, a community is understood in a broad sense to be a complex social and geographical unit comprising diferent types of members who have something
in common. For example, the members may have in common a certain profession; an ailiation with an ethnic or religious group; a shared history; a cultural identity or
kinship; an authority, common norms or rules regarding access to and use of natural resources; a common residence in existing and former settlement sites; a common
use or occupation of a territory or geographical area … or combinations of these. A community may therefore be, for example, a single village or a cluster of villages, a
group of persons within a village, a cluster of families, or a set of diferent user groups e.g. mobile pastoralists, settled farmers. A community may be deined by tradition
or kinship, or it may deine itself, for example, in terms of resource uses or patterns of particular tenure rights e.g. a ishing community. In other cases, a community may
be deined by administrative law e.g. villages as local government bodies.
12 GOVERNING TENURE RIGHTS TO COMMONS
The social and geographical boundaries of a community may be lexible and renegotiated and adapted over time. They may also be only vaguely deined, as for
example in forested areas, where some boundaries are so remote from settlements and the current main areas of use that no clear spatial boundaries are deined.
Boundaries may hence appear fuzzy to outsiders, while the rights holders themselves may be well aware of their community boundaries and members. What is more, while
a community’s social boundaries may be easily deined and upheld in the locality, its composition may alter with every birth, death, marriage or migration.
Communities undergo constant change. In many cases they are not always clearly deined socially homogenous entities with legitimate and responsible leadership
that always regulate the commons in a sustainable and inclusive manner, but rather are characterized by socio-economic disparities and power imbalances. Three
interrelated socio-economic trends have been speeding up processes of change: migration and translocality; a gradual shift from a subsistence economy based on
community solidarity towards an individualized and commercialized economy; the formalization of governance institutions, including the replacement of customary
institutions with local government bodies. In this context, it is crucial to arrive at a realistic concept of community-based governance for commons that respects
the imperative of local self-governance of natural resources, while supporting inclusive, equitable and sustainable beneits as well as participatory, transparent
and inclusive processes.