Identifying and Working with Beneficiaries When Rights Are Unclear : Insights for REDD+ Initiatives

Expert statements indicate that annually
approximately 20 billion dollars will be needed to prevent
90 percent deforestation in tropical countries. Development
practitioners are eager to see the benefits from REDD plus
initiatives shared with local partners. Equally important to
understanding how local partners might benefit are questions
such as, who should derive benefits from REDD plus
initiatives, and how to ensure these initiatives reach the
affected households, individuals, communities, companies,
and government units. Getting benefit-sharing rights is
fundamental, as it will determine how REDD plus initiatives
serve a broader development agenda and prevent them from
centralizing decision making and enabling elite capture.
This paper examines how to address this challenge by
adopting a legal pluralism framework and discussing the
potential role of legal instruments such as contracts. While
the analysis focuses largely on REDD plus activities that
involve land, forests, and carbon sequestration, many of the
principles suggested are applicable in a broad sense to REDD
plus projects dealing with energy and other matters. This
paper explores the substantive legal issues and procedural
options for identifying beneficiaries in such contexts and
ways of working with them despite the legal uncertainty. It
gives considerable attention to process, an approach
reflecting the diversity of the situations on the ground. To
explore these issues, the paper draws upon several relevant
bodies of learning on forestry projects and programs,
including the literatures on land, tree and forest tenure,
legal pluralism, forest project design and implementation,
the protection of indigenous peoples, and resettlement
issues associated with development projects. The paper also
explores how contracts or agreements could be used to work
with the beneficiaries and clearly capture the different
parties' rights and responsibilities. It examines
experiences discussed in the literature, and reviews three
good practice projects. Lessons are drawn from both those
projects and earlier relevant experiences.