In many arid areas in Southern Africa, apart from land degradation, bush encroachment is a real problem. Different countries an communities are trying different methods, but there is no coherence, and there is also a lack understanding on costs and benefits of various methods and the techniques themselves.
Q: Has LSE and/or yours work on this issue? I think that this is an important problem that should also feature in rangeland management work and proposals.

Let us talk some on collaboration.

Rangelands with moderate rainfall, such as Borana in Ethiopia and Laikipia in Kenya, demonstrate that even when soils and rain are good, the breakdown in social capital and the limited ability of institutions to cope with intensifying constraints results in degradation, despite the VERY high biophysical potential of these areas. In the driest areas, rainfall could be the strongest constraint. I can’t see soils being the primary constraint anywhere, except where severe degradation (esp. gully erosion) has already occurred.

True, IPMS and other programs working in Tigray have had substantial success. I would not underestimate, though, the challenge of working in pastoral as compared to agro-pastoral areas, as the governance systems are generally quite different.

Livestock banking? I discussed with the IBLI folks some time ago, though we didn’t go very far with it. For example, if private fodder systems exist, and they take care of animals during droughts, the trick is to make the ‘bank’ sustainable, perhaps through manure marketing (and milk? not sure that would work).

Fire and tick control!

Currently in a meeting with many partners working in Turkana and it came out that WFP is leading some work on improved food and fodder production, improved pastures and browse for livestock, and pasture regeneration. Have suggested there is a great deal of scope for collaboration as ILRI has a lot to offer on this. Will follow up.

As a starting point I use a very loose definition of “landscape” as being larger than a community scale (larger than a single village and its village forest for example), usually involving at least a cluster of several villages in case of settled populations or a traditional rangeland territory in the case of mobile pastoralists, and often larger than and encompassing protected areas if these exist in the area. For example, in one study the landscape was Mt. Marsabit: encompassing several communities and several local government units (Locations and Sublocations in the Kenyan context) and also larger than and encompassing a National Reserve and a Forest Reserve on the mountain.

But more precisely, defining and delineating the landscape has depended on the nature of the research. In the work on climate change adaptation, we have taken a “problemshed” approach: iteratively identify issues and challenges for adaptation, stakeholders, significant relationships among the issues and stakeholders, and the geographic space in which those relationships occur. This produces a problemshed-type landscape. E.g., at a site in Makueni County, Kenya, key adaptation issues revolved around water management and erosion and many relationships were upstream-downstream relationships related to water, soil and forest management, etc. Key governance actors for these issues, relationships, and stakeholders included a community forest association and a water resource users association. The geographic space where all this occurred was approximately a watershed, but we modified the boundaries according to the area of operation of these two local organizations.

In other work we’ve been doing research on existing interventions undertaken at a landscape scale, particularly rangeland management interventions. So in these cases, the landscape is pre-defined for us according to how the rangeland management intervention has defined its landscape. For instance in Borena, Ethiopia we are looking at an intervention to reinvigorate traditional rangeland management and strengthen it with a rangeland management committee. So here, the landsacpe for us is the traditionally defined rangeland territory where the management committee is working in collaboration with customary institutions.,

Some of us who work in this area feel the potential of community managed rangelands is very high, although admittedly also difficult to achieve. I’m not aware of assessments of the production potential, although maybe other colleagues reading this could enlighten us. We do have a study going on now in partnership with Ayana Angassa, a rangeland ecologist from Hawassa University in Ethiopia, to come up with simple, easily replicable protocols for assessing rangeland condition for purposes impact assessment. We hope that we can then apply the methodology to a few success stories. Going the next step of assessing the impact on livestock production of improved rangeland condition is on the wishlist.