The pastoral areas of Ethiopia are witnessing radical change in terms of both increasingly restricted mobility and access to vital resources. A cause and consequence of such constraints has been a move toward sedentarised forms of livestock and agricultural production. This is occurring in a political and socioeconomic vacuum, in which the customary institutions responsible for resource allocation and access to land are becoming weaker, and where the Ethiopian government has yet to develop a clear policy or strategy for resource distribution and tenure security in pastoral areas.

The environment is the basic determinant of the nature and productivity of rangeland eco-systems. Physical environmental factors, which include climate, topography and soil, determine the potential of rangeland to support certain types and levels of land use. Within the limits set by this potential, the influence of fire and biological environmental factors (grazing, tree cutting and shifting cultivation) results in different types of vegetations and levels of productivity.

Based on new evidence from Darfur, this report presents a scientifc account of the environmental principles of pastoralist livestock mobility, combined with a review of other key infuences on livestock movements throughout the year. Our goal is to provide policy makers and other stakeholders with an objective account of what mobile pastoralists in Darfur can achieve, how they do it, and what they might need to do it better.

In August 2013, the Government of Uganda gazetted the National Land Policy (NLP) after having initiated the policy process over three decades ago. The NLP is to provide an over-arching policy framework for land governance and management, consolidating the many other policies and laws that have governed land and natural resources since colonial times.

Understanding the perception of environmental resources by the users is an important element in planning its sustainable use and management. Pastoralist communities manage their vast grazing territories and exploit resource variability through strategic mobility. However, the knowledge on which pastoralists’ resource management is based and their perception of the grazing areas has received limited attention.

Asia drylands face increasing climate hazard risk, changing socio-economic forces, and environmental challenges that affect community viability. As home to >1 billion residents, deserts are at the centre of the continent’s climate-human predicament. Extreme water scarcity, dependence on food imports and now conflict increase hazard exposure across shared drylands, yet management differs from state to state. This paper argues that a more coherent strategy for mitigating risk would be based on natural environments.

A brief on the need to secure land rights for the world’s pastoralists, who manage rangelands that cover a quarter of the world’s land surface but have few advocates. Covers the different paths pastoralists take; resource scarcity in the face of uncertainty; pastoralism and land use; loss and fragmentation of pastoralist lands and blocking of livestock routes; managing climatic variability and climate change; initiatives for securing pastoralists rights to land (Niger, Tanzania, India, Ethiopia).

Pastoral and agro-pastoral areas in eastern Africa and elsewhere have long been regarded as peripheries in economic terms and in terms of social and cultural accomplishments. Although biased perceptions of the ‘unproductive’ uses of pastoralism have become outdated, government policies still do little to formally recognise or integrate pastoral lands as critical parts of rural livelihood systems and economic development models.

Describes a long-standing grazing dispute in northern Namibia that provides critical lessons on the challenges that people living in communal areas face to secure their land rights. Several large livestock owners illegally enclosed community rangelands to secure grazing for their own commercial cattle herds. The communities used legislation to defend their land rights: they mobilised relevant government and traditional authorities to intervene, resulting in a court order for the removal of most of the illegal cattle owners.

The topic of how best to make rangelands secure for local rangeland users is one of ongoing debates. The very nature of rangeland use – the need for landscape level planning incorporating spatially and temporally variable resources, and for recognising the multiple layers of use by multiple actors presents complexity that is not easily accounted for by the often inflexible and simpler land tenure systems that governments prefer to introduce.

The Sustainable Rangeland Management Project (SRMP) supports joint village land use planning and the protection of rangelands for local rangeland users. The project is implemented by the Ministry of Livestock and Fisheries Tanzania, the National Land Use Planning Commission, the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI), and local civil society organizations. The project activities have been funded by the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) and Irish Aid through the International Land Coalition (ILC).

This report documents the violent clashes between members of farmer communities and members of herder communities in parts of Nigeria, particularly in the northern parts of the country, over access to resources: water, land and pasture. It also documents the failure of the Nigerian government in fulfilling its constitutional responsibility of protection of lives and property by refusing to investigate, arrest and prosecute perpetrators of attacks.