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 Land Titles Granted to 41 Indigenous Communities
Bosawas Biosphere Reserve, Nicaragua
Challenge
For centuries, Indigenous Misquito and Mayangna communities have lived off the land in what is now Nicaragua’s Bosawas Biosphere Reserve. Unfortunately, however, the Nicaraguan Government failed to recognize the indigenous’ peoples claim on the land. Since the end of the civil war in 1990, poor farmers, or 'mestizos', from different parts of the country migrated to the region, converting natural forests to grazing lands, threatening both the integrity of the indigenous communities and the region’s outstanding biodiversity.
Initiative
The Nature Conservancy and USAID have been supporting the indigenous land titling process in Bosawas for more than a decade. In 2002, Bosawas was added to a portfolio of sites belonging to the Parks in Peril (PiP) program-a collaborative program between USAID and The Nature Conservancy dedicated to safeguarding protected areas- and has been providing resources for legal counsel, territorial border demarcation, training for the voluntary forest guard program, and capacity building of local indigenous organizations.
To help build a strong forest guard corps to enforce indigenous ecological norms and regulations, as well as to assist in the implementation of a conservation area plan for the region, nearly 100 local forest guards have been trained. As part of a monitoring system for local control of hunting, the guards have been trained in mammal monitoring techniques and procedures for using data to make management decisions in the indigenous territories. Additionally, farmer-to-farmer learning models to promote indigenous knowledge and best practices for agroforestry and agro-silvopastoril systems were put in place to facilitate the exchange of information between communities.
Results
In 2003, the Nicaraguan parliament passed an indigenous territories titling law, based in part on the project’s success and on May 24, 2005, the Central Government of Nicaragua granted five land titles covering 2,531 km² to 41 indigenous communities living within Nicaragua’s Bosawas Biosphere Reserve. This landmark decision to grant communal, non-transferable property rights to the indigenous communities contributes is a great victory for self-determination and efforts to reduce forest conversion. Now that the land legally belongs to the Misquito and Mayangna communities, the indigenous groups can apply the training and management skills acquired through the PiP program to effectively manage their territories over the long-term, whereas before tenuous land status resulted in more rapacious use of natural resources. By securing the rights of 21,000 indigenous peoples to the land they have used for centuries, as well as providing the groups with legal recourse to protect their territories in perpetuity, this historic land titling process in Bosawas will serve as a model for indigenous lands in Nicaragua and throughout Mesoamerica.
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