Tenure and community resource management: case studies from Northern Mindanaw

Government land and resource policies and programs have over the years shown increasing receptiveness to community-oriented programs and projects. Beginning with the Integrated Social Forestry Program,1 the DENR in particular pioneered ancestral lands and domains delineation,2 and in 1995 even went on to declare that community based forestry management will be the national strategy for forest resource management.3 1997 saw the promulgation of Rep. Act no. 8371 or the Indigenous Peoples Rights Act (IPRA), which allowed IP communities to apply for titles over their ancestral lands and domains. Although the constitutionality of the IPRA was challenged before the Supreme Court, the latter’s decision to uphold the statute’s validity4 echoed this openness to community-oriented policies, laws and programs. Through all these however little attention has actually been paid first to the notion of “community” deployed in government laws and regulations; secondly, to actual indigenous land and resource tenure practices; and lastly to the resulting dynamics between the state’s notions of “community” and indigenous tenure and those of the IP communities themselves. When ICRAF supported a research project that would assess the impact of the ancestral domains delineation procedures under DENR Admin. Order no. 2 (1993) on community resource management, a critical interest in such unproblematized issues, often obscured by unexamined assumptions, was integrated into the research project. In this way we hope to derive lessons for advocacy, policy and development planning.

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