ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the role of land tenure with respect to REDD+ using the academic literature and REDD+ planning documents. Tenure issues are generally considered crucial to REDD+ implementation. The policy challenge from a REDD+ point of view is to learn whether these successes can be spread relatively rapidly to larger scales and to landscapes where there is significant forest and a substantial threat of degradation in addition to deforestation. The literature refuses to yield magic bullets, but rather it suggests change is context-dependent and context-specific and that the sort of rapid, large-scale ambitions embedded in REDD+ can only partially be addressed by Community-Based Forest Management (CBFM) solutions. However, CBFM as a development strategy does encompass issues of democratization, political empowerment, decentralization, livelihoods, food security and locally appropriate forest management. The tension between the local and global has to be resolved when attempting to apply the lessons of past CBFM successes to REDD+.
