 Good morning. I'm Peter Cronkleton from the Center for International Forestry Research. I'll be presenting a paper that I prepared with my colleague, Ann Larson. I'm not going to read the title for you. I think you can all do that. The objective of this paper was to compare and contrast formalization processes in communal and individual properties in the Peruvian and Ecuador and Amazon with the goal of examining formalizations effect on tenure security and forest resources. Formalization is a key component of tenure to form in the Amazon and has been for decades and it's driven from multiple sources. At the grassroots level there are demands for the right for rights recognition and social justice and exemplified in different groups like the rubber tapper movement in Brazil, various indigenous movements and countries throughout Latin America. At the same time, state agencies and planners wishing to alleviate social environmental conflict and promote development in investment are also pushing formalization in the titling of lands in the Amazon with multiple goals but often exemplified by people like De Soto that prioritized individual titling of land for rural people. There are two general models of formalization in the private property in these frameworks used by government administrations, which all of you are familiar with the communal property with collective rights and individual properties with individual rights. In this research, we were looking at how these these types of systems operated in these landscapes we were looking at. Our research is based a much larger project over two years that examined four landscape mosaics in the Peruvian and Ecuador and Amazon. These were 80,000 hectare polygons that we placed in areas of frontier change where we were aware they're being multiple stakeholders using the same landscape. We identified stakeholders within these polygons and the property rights systems that they use but also their perceptions of the security of those property rights. And in the data collection, we interviewed over 300 households, conducted 21 community focus group interviews and talked to 47 key informants from state agencies and other experts on these regions. I'm just going to very briefly summarize some of the main observations we made in this study. First of all, rather than clear dichotomy between collective and individual rights, it was clear that there was much gray area nested mosaics of rights in all of the properties that we were looking at. In the communal properties, while the state was defining the external boundary or the outer edge of the polygon, internally they were nested in informal boundaries of both communal and individual land. So you would find properties that from the state's point of view were simply one collective space. Internally, there were allocated allocations of land to subgroups within the community, individual households, but also collective lands that were used seen by all of the communities together as a collective resource or a common resource, or commons that were a reserve for individual communities. The individual property, we also noticed that they were often established in spontaneous colonization and governed by informal or collective rules as people began to organize the space and allocate land and based on what their expectations or of state formalization would be, but often these processes operated strictly under informal rules used by these families moving into these spaces. And the legitimacy of rights depended on communal consensus, even after formalization, as I'll discuss in a moment. So what are the impacts of formalization on tenure security and what did we observe in the study? One of the things that was very clear early on in the study is that formalization is not permanent. From the start, there was frequently a mismatch between what was actually titled and what people used. This was the space, the size of the properties, the configurations of these spaces rarely matched the areas that people used and continued to use after formalization, largely because these areas were tied to their livelihood activities. Formalization was often followed by informalization. You had situations with imperfect title where people would be granted recognition to occupy land, but then would not follow through the process or were unable to follow through the process to get formal title, but the official recognition was often sufficient for them. There were also informal transfers in sale and division of land after it was titled, but rarely were these transactions registered. And so you had situations where you had third or fourth generations of owners living on property that was still titled to the original landowner, or land would be divided up among children or transferred to other people. So the shapes and sizes of these properties changed over time. And finally, state agencies were frequently incapable of adapting to this change. There was no land registry that was agile enough to track these changes, and the transaction costs for people to try to get those changes registered were too much for most people to afford. Also, the local legitimacy of rights is important as the formal rights. In both collective and our communal and individual landscapes, we found that collective recognition was a key component of what people observed for their security. Ethnic, there were several aspects that people recognized in these interviews. Ethnic identity was important, so if you were a Shopebo or a Kichuo indigenous person, you were seen as having a right to live in an area. Historical ties and relationships were important as people often moved into these frontier areas together and then shared a common history of development of these landscapes so people stated that they felt secure because they knew their neighbors. But also in many of these cases, there was collective labor to demarcate boundaries. So annually or periodically, people would get together as groups and clear the boundaries between properties, but often reflecting their informal understanding of what the boundaries were, not formal titles. And finally, in all of the landscapes we looked at, occupation and use were fundamental for people being seen as having legitimate ownership of land. Often this was manifest in forest clearing, and this is something we'll come back to in a second. But people saw even areas that were titled that people were not occupying the land where it had migrated to urban areas or had not cleared forest on those lands. It was seen as available to others and often would be distributed by communities even though the original owner wanted to maintain claim. Formal title is important but insufficient as a result of these other observations. We found that informants cited title as the ideal and so in both individual colonists or Campesino landscapes people wanted title, but the same thing in communal areas, indigenous or other types of use groups wanted to have their land titled, but often official recognition was sufficient. And so if they had some type of documentation from the state recognizing that they were the owners, they were satisfied or would accept that as sufficient and it would be seen as legitimate by their neighbors. But in terms of the sources of security, we observed little difference between the collective and individualized properties. And so this was often a manifestation of the weak state governments and weak state institutions in both of these areas. There were no functioning courts. There was very no public land registry. And so people relied on informal relationships and ties to be able to define the legitimacy of their claims. In terms of formalizations influence on forest resource use, in all of these landscapes, the governments were hesitant to recognize rights over forest resources and title forest lands. Frequently the titling would take place after much forest would have been cleared off an area and the state would move in. But even after land was titled, the state governments tended not want to authorize forest use. It was often set up complicated requirements for authorization to take place. So many of the forest, the use of forest resources often took place informally in black markets. Forest clearing was used to demonstrate occupation and use. But this was primarily among individual properties that occurred in both landscapes. But people within communal properties felt less need to clear land to demonstrate their use. And this was partially due to the stronger social ties within the collective properties. And finally, once rights were recognized, forest mosaics were maintained. So once the landscapes stabilized, people did maintain forest fragments and degraded patches of forest and began investing in agroforestry systems. So it wasn't a continuous path towards deforestation. So finally, just to summarize a few of these points again, in practice the dichotomy between collective and individual property rights was less clear on the ground in practice. And this included both informal and formal rights that were used by these actors. Formalization was not permanent. And so even though the goal of many of the titling agencies in these governments were to finish, they would demarcate regions that they would go in and formalize and title land, shortly after departing, you would find that much of the work they had done was no longer valid as land was transferred or exchanged. Formalization is important but insufficient to ensure tenure. So there's a number of other factors that were crucial to these families to define whether or not they felt secure on their land. And finally, one factor to guarantee security was the demonstration of huge use, which is problematic for forests. Thank you.