From January 15 to February 6, 2018, the USAID’s Tenure and Global Climate Change Program and Land Portal Foundation co-facilitated a dialogue on experiences of documenting household and community-level customary rights in Zambia. The dialogue brought together the perspectives of government, traditional leaders, practitioners, civil society, and academics to consider how customary land documentation can contribute to national development goals and increased service delivery in rural and peri-urban areas.

This report documents the violent clashes between members of farmer communities and members of herder communities in parts of Nigeria, particularly in the northern parts of the country, over access to resources: water, land and pasture. It also documents the failure of the Nigerian government in fulfilling its constitutional responsibility of protection of lives and property by refusing to investigate, arrest and prosecute perpetrators of attacks.

This paper, which focuses on the Chinyanja Triangle (CT), an area inside the Zambezi River Basin, characterises three distinct farming subsystems across rainfall gradients, namely maize-beans-fish, sorghum-millet-livestock and the livestock-dominated subsystem. It presents the socioeconomic characteristics, historical drivers of change, resources use and management (water, land, forestry) and the institutional disincentives affecting agricultural production and productivity in the region.

This research paper critically evaluates the key issues and approaches in community-based natural resource conflict management. This assessment is done in light of USAID’s recent framework "Nature, Wealth, and Power" (NWP). The purpose of the framework is to provide a clearer understanding of challenges and options regarding natural resource conflicts and attempts to manage or resolve them. Land and natural resources are vital to livelihoods and identities of people in Africa.

Community-based natural resource management (CBNRM) is key to ensuring that local communities' livelihoods needs are met through the sustainable management of natural resources. Policies promoting CBNRM mean that government agencies, non-governmental organisations and other service providers are increasingly becoming involved in supporting these communities to form natural resource management (NRM) groups to make progress in areas of resource governance and realise its economic benefits through natural resource based enterprise.

This paper discusses the problem of non-violent conflicts and disputes as a constraint to sustainable natural resource management at the community level.The article finds that:third-party mediation should only be tried if viable customary approaches to conflict management have demonstrably failedthird-party mediation should only be tried if it is impracticable to try to strengthen the customary approaches within the required timeframerecent experiences in the Lakeamu Basin seem to run counter both to the popular assertion that building social capital within civil society will be ineffective

The inspiration for this sourcebook came from a 2014 meeting of researchers, practitioners and policy makers in Addis Ababa under the auspices of an event co-convened by the Global Water Initiative East Africa (GWI EA), the International Water Management Institute (IWMI) and the Water, Land and Ecosystems programme of the CG system. The event agreed there was a pressing need for greater regional consolidation of knowledge on improving water management for smallholder farmers.

Governments and scientists have long regarded the pastoralists’ way of life as a cause of environmental degradation. This belief is rooted in a misunderstanding of the pastoralist way of life and is reflected in national policies on land tenure and resource access in Kenya. The area of land controlled by pastoralists has been steadily reduced, and pastoralists have been encouraged to give up their nomadic way of life and settle, leading to conflict between pastoralist groups and other land users and damage to the environment.

Many analysts of grassroots conflicts in African emphasized one of the following factors to be the most important: ethnic divisions, competition over resources or competition between pastoralists and agriculturalists. The role of elites has been down played in such conflicts. This argument is being challenged by current evidence as shown by the Dinka-Mundari-Bari Conflict in Juba County in Southern Sudan. The data for this paper is derived mainly from a longitudinal study dating back to 1972 using observation and interviews as the main methods of data collection.

Natural resources such as land, water, timber, minerals, metals and oil are vitally important sources of livelihoods, income and influence for countries and communities around the globe. When natural resources are poorly managed or inequitably shared, however, or when business operations are implemented without due consideration for context and communities, they can contribute to tensions that can escalate into violent conflict, or feed into and exacerbate pre-existing conflict dynamics.

This paper tests the impact of resource governance on the resource-conflict dynamic. It examines the impact of resource type, abundance and dependence on risk and duration of violent conflict, whilst also exploring the importance of the governance of natural resources in preventing or overcoming the resource-curse. It is argued that for many developing countries, the extraction of natural resources has been a blessing, as their export can provide urgently needed development capital.

What does community based natural resource management (CBNRM) mean for Mozambique's poor?Through the case study of Derre Forest Reserve in Zambezia province, this paper explores the theory and practice of CBNRM, an approach which has been widely promoted in southern Africa, and is central to elements of the Mozambican forestry and wildlife policy of 1999.The paper examines the history of community involvement in forest use in the reserve, and the changing nature of local organisations.