Place of customary rights mapping initiatives in conservation policies

In Africa, participatory mapping of land use by local people is a quite old field practice in conservation or development projects. More recently, massive on line mapping of customary rights were born under the impulse of activist NGO. These include The Mapping for Right Initiative which notably proposed to communities to prove by themselves their presence inside the forest. The announced purpose is to help the decision-makers and the private sector to recognize this presence and help international community to recognize rights linked with this presence. Promoted as a decision making-tool, this initiative try in fact to make recognize customary rights at large scale in order to put them against land management and planning (logging concession, protected areas…).The important things is that conservation world take it into consideration not as an constraint but as an opportunity. We propose as line of conduct three possibilities i) for existing protected areas, mapping of rights should promote more participation of local population in decision structure and access to benefits-sharing, but exclude rights of hunting ii) for new protected areas, mapping of rights will help the free prior and informed consent process and should lead to land sharing based on overlapping rights officially acknowledged through contracts (participation in decision structure, sharing benefits), with village hunting areas outside and around this new protected area and iii) about non protected areas where wildlife is still abundant, mapping of rights should promote community-based management and hunting rights on non-protected species. (Texte intégral