Pastoralism & Natural Resources (page 24)
Pastoralists as reliability professionals
The working paper “A new policy narrative for pastoralism? Pastoralists as reliability professionals and pastoralist systems as infrastructure” by Emery Roe (2020, 33pp) proposes that pastoralist systems are better treated, in aggregate, as a global critical infrastructure. The policy and management implications that follow differ importantly from current pastoralist policies and recommendations. A multi-typology framework […]
Bush encroachment and rangeland management in southern Ethiopia
Rangelands in southern Ethiopia have been undergoing a rapid shift from herbaceous to woody plant dominance in past decades, reducing indigenous plant biodiversity, altering ecosystem function and threatening pastoralism. Despite significant rangeland management implications, quantification of the extent of bush encroachment and transitional pathways that result in encroachment remain largely underexplored. The paper “Bush encroachment […]
Historical ecologies of overgrazing in Kenya
The spectre of “overgrazing” looms large in historical and political narratives of ecological degradation in savannah ecosystems. While pastoral exploitation is a conspicuous driver of landscape variability and modification, assumptions that such change is inevitable or necessarily negative deserve to be continuously evaluated and challenged. With reference to three case studies in Kenya – the […]
Alternative scales for formalising communal land tenure by Borana in Ethiopia
A research team from ILRI (International Livestock Research Institute), LARMAT (Dept of Land Resources Management and Agricultural Technology, University of Nairobi) and the Yabelo Pastoral & Dryland Agricultural Research Institute published the paper “An assessment of the implications of alternative scales of communal land tenure formalization in pastoral systems” in Land Use Policy 94 (2020) […]
Green economy & degradation narratives cause land conflict in Tanzania
The Tanzanian Government, investors and aid donors have presented the Southern Agricultural Growth Corridor of Tanzania (SAGCOT) as a model for the “green economy” in Africa, combining investments in large-scale farming with environmental conservation. In the Kilombero Valley, some small-scale farmers have been dispossessed through the expansion of capital investments in large-scale capital-intensive farming; others […]