Inappropriate Land Tenure Policies

Inappropriate land tenure policies are major contributors to environmental degradation, and specifically to overgrazing, in arid and semi-arid grazing systems.

Many of the present policies are out-dated and require to be adjusted to recent trends of an increased competition for remaining pasture resources and the evolution of mixed farming system and crop cultivation in former pastoral areas. Enforcement of existing rules and regulations is often incomplete, resulting in more illegal exploitation of vulnerable environment than organised use and protection.

The key negative features of many present land tenure policies that encourage environmental degradation are:

- that they treat rangelands as state property, or as empty land which can be claimed by the act of cultivation
- that they fail to recognise that geographical and temporal variability of rainfall and of key resources demands that management units on rangelands be of large scale
- that they fail to recognise the strengths and complexities of traditional pastoralist land tenure systems in allowing flexibility of resource use and avoiding resource degradation.

These features contribute to overgrazing in three ways, sometimes in combination:

- by taking land out of traditional pastoralist livestock production (for commercial ranching, or commercial or smallholder cultivation), and concentrating remaining pastoralist livestock elsewhere
- by breaking up communal land tenure systems, which allow the geographical mobility essential for sustainable arid and semi-arid livestock production, into individual or small-group plots
- by weakening communal land-tenure systems, turning controlled common-property regimes into open-access regimes allowing overgrazing by community members and others.

A process that has many of the effects of 2) above is the de facto privatisation of grazing land by larger livestock-owners through government-supported (and sometimes government-subsidised) private borehole development, which can be used to exclude small-stock owners, causing knock-on effects on other parts of the range.

Research/Appraisal Methods

To appraise the effects of land tenure policy on environmental degradation, the nature of the policies/laws has to be understood through document review, and their effects on local institutions and local environments understood through PRA or similar techniques, using, for example, herder accounts of changes in mobility, resource use, and resource availability, possibly combined with participatory mapping. In some contexts, GIS could be used to map tenure classifications against bio-physical evidence of degradation, with (more speculatively) the inclusion of participatory or socio-economic information.

Options

Related policy potions include:

- zoning of rangelands
- strengthening local natural resource management
- promoting conflict resolution mechanisms
- curtailing direct control of stocking rates
- introducing well-designed grazing fee regimes
- drought management policies

Key References

Behnke, R. 1994. Natural Resource Management in Pastoral Africa. Development Policy Review 12: 5-27.

Behnke, R. and Kerven C. 1994. Redesigning for risk: tracking and buffering environmental variability in Africa's rangelands Natural Resource Perspectives, No.1. http://www.oneworld.org/odi/nrp/1.html

Lane, C. and Moorehead, R. 1994. New Directions in Rangeland and Resource Tenure and Policy, in Scoones, I. (ed.) Living with Uncertainty: New Directions in Pastoral Development in Africa, Intermediate Technology Publications, London.

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