Rede para Gestão Comunitária de Recursos Naturais (Network for Community Management of Natural Resources) - ReGeCom, Mozambique

Representative & Effective Community Conservation in Mozambique

www.regecom.org

ABOUT: ReGeCom (Rede para a Gestão Comunitária de Recursos Naturais), the National Network for Community-Based Natural Resources Management, is a Mozambican network and platform of over 20 Mozambican NGOs and CSOs, philanthropists, universities, and government agencies. It was established due to stakeholder-wide recognition that Mozambique needed greater coordinated support in the implementation of its National CBNRM Strategy. ReGeCom seeks to facilitate community engagement to maximize the benefits from the implementation of CBNRM, including the use, sharing, and benefits generated from these resources. Specifically, ReGeCom facilitates the:

• Organization of people - Make sure decisions about land and natural resources are made by the people themselves - not the outside, but the people living directly with the resources, in a collective effort to improve their lives without compromising future generations The Community Governance Guidelines, developed by ReGeCom, are the national tool adopted to build community-based institutions.

• Organization of land - a combination of activities that included securing community land rights, registered under the national cadastre; elaborating community development agendas, where community development aspirations are registered, and supporting the development of community-level land use plans, as a planning tool to improve use, allocation and management of land, considering today’s and future livelihood needs.

  • ReGeCom is working with the National Directorate of Land to develop a standardized guideline to develop and implement community land use plans.

As a collective, ReGeCom tries to address the challenges facing the CBNRM movement in Mozambique today through the following interventions:

• Strengthening community governance systems, as a basis for sustaining all processes of recognition of the rights of communities and their involvement in leading community development processes, based on the utilization and management of natural resources. This consolidation must be accompanied by the development of instruments (land use plans, community agendas, etc.) that facilitate collective planning and decision-making;

• Development and enforcement of legal frameworks on community-based management of natural resources based on sectoral legislation, serving as a platform for harmonization and standardization of instruments and approaches that build and enhance enabling conditions for community engagement in development processes, recognizing them as an indispensable asset for the promotion of economic growth and biodiversity conservation, as active rather than passive actors.

• Building institutional capacity and information management systems that enable informed decision making for proven evidence of community management models that address specific needs for socio-economic growth and natural resource conservation.

Above all, ReGeCom is a national network, and it uses its diverse membership to build capacity, improve policies, identify challenges and opportunities, and provide a standard approach for implementing CBNRM initiatives across Mozambique, as a conservation and development agenda.

“For CBNRM to work, you need to build community governance systems, you need to know if the rights are there, you need to build capacity, and then you need to give tools such as community land use planning and other tools that support decision making.”

-José​ Monteiro, CEO of ReGeCom

The Mozambican Government has invited ReGeCom to lead the development of the community based natural resource management national action plan, which is hoped to kick off soon.

Impact

• Community Governance Guidelines is being referred in tenders launched by Biofund/ANAC and other partners as a go-to guideline, for projects that require community engagement in land and natural resources management, making a national contribution to the harmonisation of procedures for community engagement

• Launched MozSic (Mozambican System of Community Information) in December 2021, a site full of data and information related to the environmental and socioeconomic dynamics of rural communities in Mozambique. This site is part of ReGeCom’s goal of ensuring everyone has access to accurate and important information that can inform their decisions regarding economic growth, benefit sharing, and biodiversity conservation.

• A total of 47 representative community committees were established across Gorongosa National Park, Chimamanimani National Park, Maputo National Park, Marromeu National Reserve, and Zambezia landscape under effective governance and management of natural resources. Prior to ReGeCom’s, more than 800+ community bodies had been established, but none showed to be effective representatives of the communities, which resulted in elite capture and, ultimately, the continuation of deforestation, which is visible in many landscapes.

Establishing Inclusive and Representative Governance Institutions around Chimanimani National Park

For a long time, a large community area bordering Chimanimani National Park was considered as one single community, known as Moronga. When ReGeCom and its members were asked to assess this important community conservation area, Moronga had just one representative serving as the voice of natural resource management for the area. Following a community-led evaluation to better understand the landscape and socio-economic dynamics of the area, they divided Moronga into seven different communities each with its own representative committee. Now each of the seven committees can develop plans and share benefits in ways that are of interest to the people living there, rather than just to one individual who they likely had never even met. This is part of ReGeCom’s goal of helping to build an effective natural resource management governance system from the bottom up.