Montes de Socios: social entrepreneurship for rural development
Many lands in Spain, especially forests, are not property of one person but rather of a group of people. This type of joint ownership has different names depending of the region but almost all of them share the same characteristic, the woodland is pro indiviso, which means that the property is not divided between its owners. They can have different shares of the land property but there are no demarcations dividing what belongs to each member.
The property passes from fathers to sons, multiplying the number of owners with each generation and, in most of the cases, these transfers are not documented, being the title holders people dead 100 years ago. Hence, the cadastre shows that the land belongs to nonexistent companies, deceased owners or entities that do not accurately represent the legitimate owners.
This complex property regime extremely complicates the management of the forests, having to face a lot of administrative obstacles in order to complete any kind of procedure. The result is woodlands managed and exploited in a way far from ideal or completely abandoned in many cases.
Pedro Medrano, as part of the Sorian Forest Association (Asociación Forestal de Soria) has being working to solve this issue. He launched, through the initiative Partners’ Woodlands (Montes de Socios), a management model based on traditional mechanism that establishes clear partnered ownership and management of the forest.
These model, the Management Boards (Juntas Gestoras), were integrated in the Spanish legislation trough the 2003 Forestry Act (Ley de Montes). These Boards allow the co-owners of woodlands to act as a single legal entity, making possible their management and conservation, adding value to otherwise abandoned land. But also become a liaison between city and countryside people that have inherited the ownership from ancestors which were fellow countrymen, creating a renewed interest and a sense of connection to the countryside.
Partners’ Woodlands also works on the recuperation of the documental base of the forest confiscation; offers guidance for forest management and conservation and promotes the creation of legal frameworks for co-owned woodlands.
At present day, many Management Boards have been constituted through Partners’ Woodlands: 34 in Soria, 9 in Asturias, 2 in Guadalajara and 1 in León.
A two page article (present in front cover) was dedicated to the initiative in the newspaper EL País the 28th November 2011. The initiative has been also awarded with the Dubai International Award for Best Practices 2012. In addition Pedro Medrano has become, in February of this year, fellow changemaker of Ashoka.
Pedro Medrano and Cándido Moreno show a record of a co-owned woodland's owners. Source: El País Photo: Carlos Rosillo
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11 May 2014
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