An investigation into forest ownership and customary land ... - Fern

Introduction
2 Implementation
The study has been limited in scope and time. Only customary tenure directly
relevant to forest ownership has been thoroughly covered. Several trips have
been made by the author, initially to design and test field studies, largely implemented
by resident SDI staff. 4
The legal status of property interests is pivotal to land relations past and present.
Much difficulty was encountered finding and analysing the law. As the new
Minister of Justice has observed, it is not just the war which has caused documents
to be difficult to access or confusion as to their status to reign, but also past
systemic failures in the justice service. 5 Land deed information is known to exist
in several archives but is hard to access, as well as remaining essentially uncatalogued.
6 Relevant scholarship on the subject of tenure in Liberia is minimal. 7
Fieldwork with customary landholders in 37 villages proved more straightforward.
However this was limited to small study areas in five of Liberia’s fifteen
administrative counties (map 4, page 16). Although similar as clusters of related
villages, three of these areas are administratively defined as ‘clan areas’ while
two are defined as ‘chiefdoms’. The selection of counties was made with a bias
towards forested areas, but spread geographically to ensure coverage of coastal
and hinterland zones, to sample main ethno-linguistic differences and different
levels of population density and permanent tree crop farming. Map 5, page 16,
illustrates population density in 2004. Table 1, page 52, provides an overview of
selected counties against the above criteria.
51
4 Led by Dr. Sam Koffa, an experienced social forester, and ably assisted by Zlenyonoh Tarlue, Jonathan
Yiah and Trokon Brown, with additional inputs examining court disputes by Dr. Lofen Keneah, a part-time
legal adviser to SDI.
5 Banks 2006.
6 Variously held in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the National Archives and the President’s Mansion, the
last due to the fact that original title deeds are signed by the President.
7 Even a detailed profile on tenure was able to cite only one or two studies (Knox 1998).