 Good morning. As Louis said, my name is Peter Cronkleton. I'm based in Lima, Peru working for the Center for International Forestry Research, but I'm collaborating on this team with funding from the from DFID to examine tendencies in reforestation in these three countries. I'd like to point out that this is a multi-author paper. There are teams working on each of the three countries where we are doing this research in Nepal, China, and Ethiopia. I won't name all of them. You can see them on the screen. The title of my paper today is Dealing with Property Rights. And so the reason for that is secure property rights are seen as a key enabling condition for a forest restoration. To change stakeholder behavior, either to get them to invest in restoration or to limit extraction to allow restoration, they need to have insurance of future benefit gains from forest restoration and confidence that mechanisms to enforce rules exist and that others will comply with those rules. However, secure property rights are more than just land title. There are several characteristics of property rights that I want to point out today. There are themes that run through the cases that we're going to examine in this paper. First is the issue of the origin of rights or the nature of those rights, whether they're formal or customary. And in most systems, you find a mixture of both statutory legal rights and rules and customary practices and beliefs. Also, it's important to understand that there are often different types of property. There's state or public lands, private that can be both individual or collective, meaning that there's some entity that's able to exclude others. But there are also open access situations that often result from either an overlap of these different types of property where people are able to venue shop or a breakdown in governance where there is actually no established property system and functioning. And in most of these cases, you have nested systems. So you have sometimes collective systems where there are customary individual property rights within them and individual property rights systems where customary customary collective rights allow the establishment of security. Also, it's important to understand that property is usually seen as a bundle of rights. So you have access rights, whether you're able to enter and benefit somehow from a property, whether you have the right to withdraw from that property, basically to extract, but without influencing the behavior of other individuals or having ability to plan long term. Management rights that actually allow you to make decisions on how a property or a research should be used and make long term planning decisions. Exclusion rights, which are the ability to keep others from using the right. And alienation, which is basically the idea that you can transfer or sell your rights to another individual or entity. When we're discussing forest property, it's important to understand that usually states embark on a partial devolution of rights. It's rare that forest resources are transferred with the entire set of rights transferred to the local communities. And this creates a co-management system, basically where there are shared rights and benefits. The local entity that receives the rights has the ability to benefit, but they also have responsibilities to comply with regulations established by the state. But also the state has obligations to provide basic conditions to allow them to manage. So I'm going to go through the three examples relatively quickly, since I don't have much time. And I want to just go through first the tendencies and the policy changes as they affected property rights, and then look at local examples to see how those played out. So in Nepal, the transaction occurred over several decades. In 1957, there was a nationalization act that placed all forests under state control with the intention of protecting and conserving forests, but instead increased degradation by creating open access situations. In 1976, there was a national forestry plan that devolved rights to local government and attempted to promote restoration programs, but these were done in a way that there was very little local participation in the plantations that were being established on public lands, so these had limited levels of success. In 1988, there was a master plan in the forestry sector where policymakers in Nepal began to recognize that communities needed to play a role in the management and restoration of these forests, but it was not immediately established as the national policy. This took place with the 1993 Forestry Act that recognized community forestry user groups that were able to gain control over forests near their residents. It required these groups to formalize by adopting a constitution using a template established by the government and to develop operational plans for the management of the restoration area that they were going to be working with. It also reduced the quasi-judicial powers of local forestry officials who had had a great deal of control over forest access, but also were channels of corruption. Very quickly, this system was very recognized and successful, and over the following decades, it was expanded to over 19,000 community forest user groups in the country covering 1.7 million hectares, basically 33% of the forest in Nepal, and almost 40% of the households, which is quite impressive. We're going to look at a specific watershed near Pokhara, and a community that I'm just going to refer to as SRD, not wanting to massacre the Nepali. SRD is a watershed that has been quite successful. There are 77 community forest user groups managing over 2,000 hectares of forest, and it includes over almost 8,000 households participating in these restoration efforts. This specific community, SRD, has 219 households managing an area of only 22 hectares, but this is a significant area of land for this household. Prior to 1993, they had no rights over forest restoration and no stake in decision making over this area. Conservation activities were designed by external experts and implemented with minimal local investment or involvement. Residents lacked interest in participation and did not collaborate with conservation measures, so typically extracted fuel wood or fodder from this area allowed their animals to graze activities that were against the official rules. After the 1993 Forest Act, the community began organizing to implement their own restoration plan, and this was in collaboration with local officials, and after 1995, they were given official recognition for management of this area. They managed this area for fuel wood, fodder, and bedding materials, so to a certain extent it's mainly for subsistence purposes, but they also sell many of these products to surrounding communities. The regulations established by the user group require members to invest labor and tree planting and to guard the forest, control grazing, and to monitor for forest fires. There are designated collection periods for fuel wood and leaf litter that facilitate regeneration, and then the rights that each member have include access, withdrawal, management, exclusion, and these rights are held perpetually, although they're required to update their management plan every five years, and if they don't do that, they're not allowed to commercialize products from this forest, but they are allowed to continue to use it. And this has significantly increased the forest quality and the community looks forward to possible benefits from payments for environmental services or ecotourism processes that are currently being negotiated. Now I'm going to switch to the example in China and quickly go over a few of the policy trends. In 1981, one policy was the household responsibility system, which allocated agricultural land to increase and increase productivity. Basically, households were given tenure certificates as long-term lease contracts, and this has subsequently applied to forest land, although with mixed results in different regions. A new tenure form between 2003 and 2008 transferred 99% of China's collective forest lands to individual households, groups, investors, and village collectives, and they were given long-term tenure security in the form of 70-year renewable contracts. They also had the potential once they had these contracts to receive other types of subsidies for forest restoration, and this reversed a trend of forest loss in southern China. I want to look, we're going to look specifically at the Chianting County and the Fujian province. This is an area of over 300,000 hectares with a population of over 500,000 people. It was once one of the most degraded counties in China. 60% of the territory suffered from soil erosion. Forest landscape restoration programs began in 1981 and focused on 970,000 hectares of eroded lands. The program focus included exclosure efforts, afforestation, and orchard plantations. By 2015, eroded lands were reduced from just over 30% of the area to less than 10%. Forest coverage increased from about 60% in 1986 to over 80%, and the annual income increased from $60 in 1978 to over $1,000 in 2015. But there was a separate policy process at work in this context that involved different levels of government and different mandates. The three-forest fixed reform from the early 1980s was intended to stabilize forest ownership. It delimitated the boundaries of mountain exposures that were then devolved through the system of forest responsibility. So 16% of the mountainous forested lands were distributed to 94% of the households, but in very small parcels of less than one hectare per household. Most of the forest remained collectively managed by the government and village collectives. Later, the Who Plant Who Own and the Wasteland Auction Policy in the 90s allowed villagers to invest in afforestation and plantations to receive certificates of forest rights. It increased participation, forest cover, and income. This was a very significant process. And then the reform of collective forest rights after 2002, and this was a decentralization of forest rights from collectives to individuals. The state maintained forest land ownership but granted access, use, and management rights to forest lands to households. Additional incentives were reduced taxes and fees and the ability to participate in other restoration programs. This allowed forest land, it also allowed forest land mortgages that increased enthusiasm for investment in afforestation and diversified participation in forest landscape restoration. So the trends in these incentives were that generally you saw a process of collective and public owned property rights arrangements provided relatively low incentives early on. The Forest Three Fixed program provided insufficient incentives for management and protection and theft in forest products continued. However, the collective forestry reform decreased thefts and illegal harvests. However, no afforestation activities either because land was managed through exposure so it was limited. But villagers were unwilling to invest in forest landscape restoration on small remote areas with limited rights. However, later the individualization of forest rights arrangements provided relatively high economic incentives to large households, enterprises, and cooperatives. Individual stakeholders willing to invest in afforestation were able to attain economic benefits. And individualized property rights arrangements encouraged public participation and diversified participation in the restoration of landscapes. Now I'm going to move on quickly to the Ethiopia example. The policy trends that we've heard a little bit about in Ethiopia started, I want to start primarily after the 1975 coup that replaced a quasi feudal system with the nationalization of forest properties throughout the country. Which created an open access problem because the nationalization did not take into account local customary practices and state agencies lacked the capacity to actually control the forest areas that were nationalized. It corresponded with an increased national research degradation due to droughts and so you had large scale government programs to conserve soil and water on sloping integrated lands, massive tree planting programs on state lands and major investments but with limited success. After 1991 there was another violent transition in government which maintained the tenure policy but introduced other reforms but also weakened governance in many rural areas. The national conservation strategy in 1994 stressed that local participation and development should be prioritized and used decentralized approach to implementing forest restoration programs. And it created space for NGOs to experiment with participatory forest management which was one of these strategies that was promoted. NGOs helped to negotiate agreements between communities and regional government agencies although no formal rights to property were transferred, it designated withdrawal rights and some management and exclusion rights to communities surrounding forests. We're going to focus specifically on the Chalimo Forest in the Oromiya State and this was while it had been designated as a national forest priority area, much deforestation during the period of the weak governance following violent change in government in 1991. So from 1982 to 1995 forests in this area shrank from over 22,000 hectares to just over 6,000 hectares. And in 1996 the NGO Farm Africa and SOS International began promoting PMF as brokers between communities around this forest and the district government. And in 2004 they were able to gain some official access and gain withdrawal management and exclusion rights and in 2004 the district officials legalized the bylaws of the forest user group officially transferring the management and use rights. The Chalimo FUG which is one of these groups included natural forest and devolved rights over plantations that had been planted as a buffer. They were only allowed to harvest NTFPs from the natural forest, this included grasses, medicinal plants and fuel wood, but they were allowed the collective sale of timber from the plantations which was less restricted, there were less restrictions on use and it's allowed this user group to have considerable income from timber sold from these plantations and as a result deforestation was reduced and regeneration was enhanced in this particular community. However there were concerns about marginalization, the government had decided on the composition of the forest user groups and so there was a lack of transparency in the distribution of responsibilities and benefits sharing mechanisms. State agencies still lack the capacity to assist with enforcement of exclusions so there is illegal harvests of small diameter trees and leakage into non-participatory forest management forests near the user group. Compared to forest user groups without plantations the timber economic returns were lower than expected in neighboring groups. However communities expect that being granted the PFM status is an incremental step to gaining recognition to stronger property rights in the future so that just the opportunity to potentially get rights in the future it continues to provide incentives for people to participate. So finally in conclusion I just want to draw what I think are four main points out of these cases. First of all secured property rights are an important enabling factor in forest restoration I think that's seen in all of these cases. However secure property rights are more than just land titles and involve multiple government scales, relationships and behavior. Generally partial devolution of rights produces co-management situations and I think that's what you see in all three of these cases. And finally efficient and effective solutions result from adaptive multi-stakeholder processes involving negotiations and balance of trade-offs. Thank you.