Governance is recognized to be a key factor in achieving the sustainable use of rangelands. Among the pillars having sustained pastoralist livelihoods for millenia (environment, economy and society), social control is fundamental in preventing misuse of resources or breakage of usage regulations. A fundamental adaptation component of pastoralists to the harsh landscapes they inhabit, in drylands, mountains or cold areas, is the risk-spreading strategy of communal land use and management, so collective use regulations of the land have been inevitable in all pastoralist systems on Earth. Respecting such rules guarantees the provision of ecosystem services and maintenance of ecosystem function – evidence of extensive livestock in providing such services is increasingly growing in the last decades. The long-term economic sustainability of livestock keeping is also only guaranteed by such a sound ecosystem management.
The right of users to manage rangelands is however a contentious issue. Attributing local communities the capacity to make decisions on the lands they use implies a delegation of power by the State that many governments regard suspiciously. In addition, rangelands are often owned either by the State or by private owners that may or may not practice complementary activities on such lands, thus further deepening potential conflict over such lands. The issue is further deepened by the disregard on communal ownership that modern economic theory poses, with troubles to e.g. get credits for livestock kept and therefore exacerbating the need for livestock keepers to own land, or by making it impossible to implement soil carbon fixation payment schemes.
In this context, it is therefore fundamental to understand the main challenge for pastoralists around land. The ownership of land becomes a secondary issue, tenure and access rights being much more important to guarantee livelihoods. In order to guarantee food security, sound environmental management and the maintenance of a basic economic activity in otherwise sparsely populated landscapes, the access to rangelands at the right times of the year is the most fundamental element.
Previous publications have already dealt with the issue on how rangeland users can secure their land access. Also at International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), “The land we graze” (IUCN, 2011) was published in 2011 as a compendium of examples worldwide where pastoralist organizations and collectives secured their access to land. A further fundamental piece of information is “Restoring community connections to the land “(Fernández-Giménez et al., Reference Fernández-Giménez, Wang, Batkhishig, Klein and Reid2012), centred on China and Mongolia, a scenario particularly challenging because of the widespread land degradation problems as well as because of the troubles in overcoming the language barriers.”
“The Governance of Rangelands” completes these views by presenting a compendium of experiences across different projects to enable local pastoralist communities in securing their user's rights. Case studies from fully industrialized countries such as the USA or Spain are combined with others from Morocco, Lebanon, Jordan, Mongolia, Niger, Cameroon, Kenya and Botswana to bring a global picture of the latest developments in the field – unfortunately, a case study in Bolivia had to be finally left out. The information is put in the context of rangeland use and governance to illustrate the full meaning of achieving sound community-controlled land tenure and use.
The book ultimately shows, through multiple examples and a thorough analysis, the importance of setting up governance schemes that are acceptable for the local communities in order to have them fully on board to work for the future of rangelands. Such a piece of information needs to be urgently taken into account for the policy formulation in rangelands by governments and for the intervention of development agencies and non-governmental organizations in these settings.
