FLC: Pastoralist Land Right Project

General

The on-going debate on governance and benefit sharing in the forest sector and the push for the recognition of participatory forest management options represents potential for communities to receive benefits from forest conservation effort. Equitable benef it sharing in PFM is considered one of the most important issues for community cohesion conflicts solving/managing and in enhancing community voice and good governance.Well managed benefit sharing models provide positive incentives to support forest conser vation-plus presents enormous potential benefits for forest communities. It also presents unprecedented potentials for raising incomes securing land rights and social development. On the other hand as a consequence of the increasing pressures on and value of forest lands connected with the creation and commercialization of products and services they are expected to generate also potential social and environmental cost with related unprecedented risks of conflict between stakeholder groups and interests if b enefits and costs sharing as well as governance issues are not properly and well addressed from the very beginning. This project aims to establish pilot projects on benefit sharing accompanied by the necessary governance issues in 3 forest blocks in Mount Kenya region. The project will establish a learning platform in a number of areas including analysing benefit/cost sharing aspect and governance issues. Key questions to be answered include 1) Who will benefit from PFM 2) Mode of payment 3) What are the e xpected costs and possible risks from PFM 4). What are the core aspects to be considered in formulating proper benefit sharing mechanism and adopting good governance principles.The overall goal of the proposed project: ?To enhance governance and institutio nal capacity of community forest associations (CFA) in managing the affairs of the forest including equitable benefit sharing.