Making Rangelands Secure Bulletin 5 (May 2014)

Joint village land use planning in Tanzania provides an opportunity for neighbouring villages to formalise previously customary arrangements for sharing of resources and livestock mobility across village boundaries. In Tanzania, the Village Land Act 1999 and the Land Use Planning Act 2007 state that villages should agree on their boundaries, register and certify them with assistance from the local District Council, and then plan the use of the land through a process of zoning, developing management plans and setting up responsible committees for their implementation.

However, the danger of this in rangelands is that by formalising boundaries around a village and defining landuse zones, the mobility and multiple use that optimises the productivity potential of rangelands can be lost. The Sustainable Rangeland Management Project (SRMP) led by the  Ministry of Livestock and Fisheries Development (MLFD), supported by ILC, IFAD, CARE,  TNRF (Tanzania Natural Resource Forum) amongst others, has been working over the last three years to identify how village landuse planning can be implemented in order to better facilitate  and support rangeland productivity  and sustainable management.

In Making Rangelands Secure Bulletin 5 (12pp), this is the title story. Other topics include pastoral Maasai youth involvement in decision-making about land tenure in southern Kenya, community protocol development by Borana pastoralist to “Save Lamu” in response to the LAPSSET infrastructure project in northern Kenya, and benchmarks for land governance in Africa.

Posted on 29 August 2014 in Pastoralism & Natural Resources, Pastoralism, Mobility & Land Tenure, Pastoralism, Policy & Power, Pastoralist Livelihoods & Nutrition