Room For Manoeuvre: Local Organisations and Resource Tenure Administration in Highland Kafa, Southwest Ethiopia

The role of local organisations in tenure administration is examined, giving particular emphasis to past and present processes of forest law enforcement and settlement of forest use-related disputes in highland Kafa, Ethiopia. The involvement of local rural organisations in tenure administration is mainly a consequence of the 1975 Land Reform Proclamation. Recently community-initiated local organisations have become increasingly involved in dispute settlement along with statesponsored ones. This has in turn created the conditions for a synergetic relationship between these organisations in tenure administration. Ineffectual forest legislation and limited government capacity to implement the tenurial provisions have, inadvertently, allowed local organisations to adopt tenure rules to suit local interests, which at times tended to favour the powerful and disregarded forest conservation imperatives. It is argued that tenure administration should aim at sustainability and equitability, and these necessitate enactment of livelihood-oriented forest tenure reform that builds upon and reinvigorates local institutional capital.