Pastoral grazing in Tanzania’s village land forest reserves

Over the past 30 years, participatory forestry reforms have tried to roll back the enclosures of forests that characterised the colonial era. However, a vast body of literature reveals how these reforms have faced resistance from forestry bureaucracies hesitant to give up control. In the article “Rendering homogenous and incompatible: pastoral grazing in Tanzania’s village land forest reserves”, published in 2025 in the Journal of Political Ecology (https://doi.org/10.2458/jpe.5948), Ben Rwelengera and Jumanne Abdallah examine this situation from the perspective of grazing, a major use of landscapes with trees in Tanzania. By reviewing policies, legislation, and presidential and ministerial parliamentary speeches, they show how colonial tropes thrive in national-level governance circles, problematising grazing in all forest spaces. Granted the institutional ambiguities and legal lacuna, the state succeeds in mobilising discourses of incompatibility that blur the differences between categories of forest reserves and pathologise pastoralists as the ‘other.’ The analysis indicates that participatory forestry reforms cannot proceed in the absence of broader decolonisation in understanding the values and capacities of (rural) communities.

Posted on 7 May 2026 in Pastoralism & Natural Resources, Pastoralism, Mobility & Land Tenure, Pastoralism, Policy & Power