Earlier on this is worded as ‘Strengthening good customary practices and discouraging harmful customary practices and expand participation and benefit sharing of women and youth’ (p.33).

This sectoral strategy is justified on the basis of the following premises:

1. ‘there have been useful and acceptable customary practices such as natural resources management that have been used for years and that could contribute to the sustainable development agenda. However these customary practices have not been recognized and could not contribute to sustainable development’;
2. ‘in certain pastoral areas women and youth have been victims of backward customary practices; clan-based organization and property relation[s]; land ownership that harbored negative attitudes; and harmful traditional practices. The problem could not be improved because of the failure in implementation of the policy and strategic framework’;
3. ‘where women and youth are considered as central and key in the implementation of the development and peace and democracy building works in their locality, the development of pastoralists will be speedy, judicious and comparable; peace will be sustainable and reliable; and our democracy would be broad-based’.

The strategy is described as aiming to act on these premises in the following directions:

1. conducting ‘continuous public discussions so that the people [will] abandon such harmful traditional practices with their own decision; and it is also necessary to conduct follow up activities to ensure that harmful practices once condemned will not flourish again so that [a] conducive environment to development and good governance is created’;
2. ‘Our development activity in pastoral areas … shall give special attention to women and youth and programs and packages shall be created to ensure their participation and benefit sharing’.

COMMENTARY

Recognize and support customary natural-resource management practices. The opening premise of this sectoral strategy is that ‘useful and acceptable customary practices such as natural resources management that … could contribute to … sustainable development … have not been recognized’ (p.77). The customary practice for natural-resource management that is most crucial for the sustainable functioning of pastoral systems, and for their resilience, is mobility (p.15). Mobility itself rests on the customary system of communal land holding, developed to enable necessary flexibility in resource access – i.e. the ‘communal customary organization and administration’ that enables the sustainable matching of mobile livestock and variable potential inputs from the natural environment (p.15). The activities under this strategy appear to focus on harmful traditional practices. Thus, the crucial task of recognizing and supporting customary natural-resource management practices, as emphasized in the description of this strategy, seems to be left to the regional states.

a. Avoid harmful traditional practices inflicted on women in pastoral areas (p.78) »