Are there customary rights to plants? An inquiry among the Baganda (Uganda), with special attention to gender

Debates around Common Property Resources and Intellectual Property Rights failto consider traditional and indigenous rights regimes that regulate plant resourceexploitation, establish bundles of powers and obligations for heterogeneous groups ofusers, and create differential entitlements to benefits that are related to social structures.Such rights regimes are important to maintaining biodiversity and to human welfare;failing to recognize them presents dangers. The case study investigates the genderednature of informal rights to selected tree and plant species that are distinct from, butrelated to, customary rights to land and trees, and are embedded in cosmology and socialnorms.