ABSTRACT
Governments worldwide, from nations to local villages, regulate the use of forest resources with property rights known as forest tenures. These tenures are made up of combinations of rights and rules that influence the economic behavior of property holders. Forest tenures may be defined and conceptualized in ways that allow them to be studied using economic tools. Such an approach involves considering forest tenures within the context of market versus government failures, economic rents, economic behavior and Pareto efficiency. But the study of forest tenures is fraught with challenges. Forest tenures often grant rights to multiple forest resources, each of which may have different, but interrelated, property rights and values. Forest tenures are also dynamic, influencing the security of forest tenures and the subsequent economic behavior of tenure holders. Identifying impacts of forest tenures is also complicated by the presence of market and regulatory forces that combine to influence economic behavior. Such complexity contributes toward the problem of conservative reinforcement that can inhibit policy change. Finally, challenges in identifying economic impacts of tenures in developing countries is made more difficult by complications that arise from thin or missing markets, and the presence of multiple layers of formal and informal rules.
