Legal aspects

This publication is a collection of documents and reports relating to the first stages of the Europe and Northern Asia Forest Law Enforcement and Governance process (ENAFLEG), primarily emerging from the project entitled: ENA-FLEG: Optimising Russian forest resilience to climate change through improved forest governance arrangements.

An environmental flow is the water regime provided within a river, wetland or coastal zone to maintain ecosystems and their benefits where there are competing water uses and where flows are regulated. Pioneering efforts in South Africa, Australia and the United States have shown that the process to establish them poses great challenges.

The mountainous region of Chitral, which recently became the first district in Pakistan to have a conservation strategy, is renowned for its rugged landscape and unique culture. What is perhaps less well known is that the area possesses a rich tradition of customary law and indigenous statecraft. This heritage, spanning a period of nearly 700 years, encompasses a wide range of subjects from defence and civil administration to land tenure systems and natural resource management.

At the heart of ‘co-management’ of natural resources is a process of collective understanding and action by local communities and other social actors. The process brings about negotiated agreements on management roles, rights, and responsibilities, making explicit the conditions and institutions of sound decentralised governance. De facto, co-management is about sharing power.

The workshop was organised to improve the understanding of the dialectic between water-related infrastructures and institutional frameworks in West Africa.