SOAS Research Online

Abstract

Nothing affects natural resource management more than resource tenure and property rights. This paper argues that natural resource management revolves around clarification, elaboration and enforcement of resource tenure rights, and that failure to clarify, elaborate and enforce the different bundles of these rights is central to many of the challenges faced in natural resource management, especially, in community based natural resource management. From a legal and regulatory perspective, we construe natural resource management as nothing but an interplay of legal and non-legal rights that incentivize and/or disincentivize peoples’ full enjoyment of the different bundles of rights within the framework resource tenure and property rights. As such, we observe that failure to clarify, elaborate and enforce these rights along the different interested parties delineated as users, proprietors, owners, of, and claimants to, a pool of natural resources, marks the largest lacuna in natural resource management law and policy. Therefore, many of the challenges faced in natural resource management in Zambia are emblematic of a conundrum of resource tenure and property rights.