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Theme: Legal empowerment for secure resource access

Addressing the “rights” challenges of water infrastructure programmes

Implementing development programmes can raise significant resource rights challenges. Programmes involving tree planting raise issues as to who holds the land, as to whether local groups involved in the programme have the right to plant trees on that land, as to who owns and benefits from the trees planted through the programme, and so on. Similarly, water infrastructure programmes (e.g. to create irrigation infrastructure or pastoral water points) raise issues as to who has what rights over what before and after the programme intervention.

In the past, little attention was paid to these issues. As a result, many well-meaning water programmes ended up undermining land tenure security, fostering land disputes and contributing to resource degradation.

To respond to these challenges, we work to generate knowledge on these issues; to promote exchange of experience and lesson sharing among development agencies, so as to promote better practices; and to facilitate informed debates on how to establish a legal framework that enables to address these issues. Our work in this area focuses on water programmes in the Sahel.

Land and water rights in the Sahel
This body of work started with a scoping study to identify key challenges and lessons learned. The study was funded by the FAO and Sida, and focused on the Sahel. In tackling land and water rights issues, the study took a socio-legal approach. It analysed those rights both in law and in practice, combining an analysis of legal texts with a review of studies from a range of social science disciplines, and with original fieldwork in Senegal (on irrigation) and Niger (on pastoral water points). And, given the importance of customary rules for the management of water and land rights in much of the rural Sahel, it paid special attention to the way in which land and water rights are affected by the interplay between statutory and customary law.

Click here to download the summary report.

This research also fed into the UNDP Human Development Report 2006, which focused on water. Click here to read it. Click here to read the background papers we prepared for it.

The Sahel Water Governance Learning Group - PROGRES
The scoping study paved the way to the establishment of a Sahel Water Governance Learning Group (PROGRES, from its French title - Projet de Gouvernance des Ressources en Eau au Sahel). Funded by DANIDA, this programme works to promote better water policies and programmes that take account of the land tenure implications of water governance. It does so by generating knowledge, facilitating exchange of experience and promoting informed policy debate among key actors at different levels of the water and related sectors (local, national and sub-regional). The programme uses the innovative ‘learning group’ approach successfully piloted by IIED in its work on forest governance and on participatory monitoring and evaluation of decentralisation in the Sahel. PROGRES focuses on four Sahelian countries: Senegal, Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger.

For more information on this programme, visit the programme web page.

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