The Legal Needs of Rural Communities

The need for legal incentives to promote sustainable management is especially acute where local people are directly dependent on important and threatened environmental resources such as forests, rangelands, mountains and coastal areas, and already possess local knowledge about how to manage those resources in sustainable ways.

The tendency of national law to override—and international law to overlook—the interests of rural peoples is historically rooted, and continues to frustrate sustainable development and sound environmental governance. The transition from colonies to nation-states in Asia, Africa, and Latin America resulted in surprisingly little change in state laws, policies, and practices for allocating power and wealth among the national citizenries. Instead, most nations in the South continue to mirror the policies and biases of their former colonizers, especially in laws related to natural resource rights and management (For example, see Balancing Acts: Community-Based Forest Management and National Law in Asia and the Pacific).

Creative approaches and new opportunities are urgently needed to respond to the problems and contributions of rural peoples, particularly those pertaining to community-based legal incentives for sustainable development. From environmental and human rights perspectives, the challenge is to develop and promote equitable legal relationships between local communities, formal national and regional governmental institutions, and other organizations that support local endeavors for sustainable community-based management of natural resources.