Stakeholders

Who are the stakeholders in the land use planning of a particular area? The stakeholders, or interested parties, are individuals, communities, or government entities that have a traditional, current, or future right to co-decide on the use of the land in a planning exercise. They include:

• Regional intergovernmental cooperation entities, such as the Amazon Cooperation Treaty system. They are for example intended to ensure a harmonious conservation and development, an international river basin or a phytogeographic region.
  

• National or federal governments. They have strategic interests such as physical security over the land by ensuring natural human occupation of the whole of their sovereign territory, promotion of commodities for export or internal food security, energy development; settlement of excess population from other parts of the country; control of precious mineral extraction, or drug production and trafficking.
  

• State or provincial governments, as well as district or municipal authorities. They have a direct responsibility for the well-being of the human population within their administrative boundaries; they may either want to stimulate or to dissuade human settlements in rural areas (e.g. produce versus ecotourism), but in general will need to raise revenues for part of their administrative functions.
  

• Non-governmental organisations (NGOs), promoting one or more specific goals. They may be public-interest organizations, such as the green movements that care about the maintenance of ecological or historical values; business-interest NGOs, such as associations of mining companies, energy-generation institutions or the fertilizer industry; NGOs of scientific interest that study the long term effects of land cover and land-use changes; grass root NGOs that strive for socially equitable sustainable development of their own local community or environmental conservation areas, and religion-inspired NGOs that are concerned about spiritual and social well-being of rural or peri-urban population groups or the conservation of holy places.
  

• Individual title deed or concession holders of large tracts of the land, using it for productive or conservational purposes, for hunting or plain capital investment.
  

• Long-existing rural communities, with communal or individual ownership of land that is or should be sufficient in size to ensure a basic livelihood for men, women and offspring.
  

• Landless people and autonomous groups of migrants that seek to eke out a living, permanently or temporarily on yet unoccupied or under-utilized land (male and female squatters, forest product gatherers, fishery folk, small-scale miners) or who wish to be hired as labourers in rural or peri-urban enterprises.
  

• Urban communities in the area, or tourists, seeking rural recreational facilities.
  

• Traditional (i.e. indigenous) inhabitants of the region, wishing to conserve their traditional ways of living and landholding rights, and to use their legalized or claimed territorial rights on their own terms.

This listing does not imply an order of importance. It is obvious that at regional and national levels governments will be the key players. At village or district-level planning the existing rural communities and/or original inhabitants should be primarily involved. It is at the latter level too, that equity and security of land tenure, gender issues, the required minimum size of land holding per household, and the intergenerational sustainable use of the local land resources become most salient. Community driven traditional forms of deliberation are then often a sound starting point for solving potential conflicts. At the "meso" level i.e. land use planning for a district/province or (sub)catchment area within a country, the top-down and bottom-up approaches and interests can and should meet on equal terms.

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