Three villages now hold legal title to the forest they protect
After four years of paperwork, three communities in the Mbeli area hold formal community forest titles over 18,400 hectares.
Restoration does not last if the people doing the work can be moved off the land at the stroke of a pen. For four years the three villages in the Mbeli area had been protecting forest they did not legally hold. As of this month they hold formal community forest titles over 18,400 hectares.
The titles give the communities a legal say over who logs, hunts and clears inside the boundary. Before, a logging concession could be drawn over their land in the provincial capital without anyone asking them. Now the law requires their consent, and that changes who has to come to whom.
Getting here took four years and a great deal of patience. There were repeated trips downriver and overland to the provincial capital, files lost and refiled, and long waits for officials who were not in a hurry. A local legal team we funded carried most of that weight, because the villages could not have navigated it alone.
Espérance Bofenda and the Mbeli ranger collective did the quieter part. It was a ranger noticing that survey markers had been moved that first flagged the boundary dispute the title process then had to settle.
We are not pretending a title is the end of the matter. A piece of paper is only worth what someone is willing to do to defend it, and the people who defend this one are the community rangers who walk the boundary. The title without the rangers would be an empty claim.
But the paper changes the conversation with outside logging interests, and that was always the point. It moves the villages from squatters on their own forest to its legal owners, and that is a far harder position to push aside.
