Participatory land use planning (PLUP) for pastoral areas overcomes many of the challenges of conventional land use planning including creating hard boundaries around villages or other administrative units, breaking up and limiting
or preventing access to shared grazing lands and water points. PLUP for pastoral areas aims to keep rangelands
and particularly grazing lands intact working across administrative boundaries through joint PLUP agreements strengthening reciprocal relations, collective tenure and good governance and resolving and preventing conflicts

This report is a contribution to ILRI's RECONCILE project Livestock, Climate and System Resilience (LCSR), a research program that aims to improve participatory rangeland management (PRM) uptake by establishing a stronger technical base. The three-year project builds on the gains and lessons learned in the implementation of PRM in Baringo implemented under similar collaborative arrangements and promoted PRM both as a concept for rangelands management and restoration and as a process that promotes sustainable land use, policy and governance of rangelands and pastoral livelihoods systems.

This paper analyzes the complex relationships of factors influencing rangeland governance in the arid areas. A Bayesian Belief Network (BBN) model was developed in a participatory way to illustrate and assess the weight of a combination of environmental, social and institutional factors enabling the achievement of strengthened rangeland governance at a local level. The Bayesian model was applied in Tataouine situated in south of Tunisia. A complex diagram was built in a participatory way to illustrate the most important interactions between rangeland socioecological system components.

Arbajahan Ward, located within the arid landscape of Wajir West, Wajir County, is home to a resilient pastoral community heavily reliant on rangelands for sustenance. The International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI), in collaboration with the Resource Conflict Institute(RECONCILE), initiated Participatory Rangeland Management (PRM) to build the capacity of local communities to better manage their lands. A Capacity Strengthening Workshop for the Rangeland Management Committee was a pivotal component to this and was successfully held from October 31st to November 2nd, 2023.

Within discussions of land and resource rights, there is growing attention to women’s rights, mostly in terms of household and individual rights to private property. This leaves unanswered questions about whether and how women’s land rights can be secured under collective tenure, upon which billions of people worldwide depend. There is an important gap in conceptual tools, empirical understanding, and policy recommendations on women’s land rights within collective tenure.

The combination of inadequate understanding of the dynamics in rangeland ecosystems and local livelihood systems are to blame for the inappropriate policy actions, unabated rangeland degradation trends, impoverishment of communities living in the rangelands, and their increased vulnerability to various shocks including climate change. The root cause of these problems is mainly linked to lack of inadequate skilled human resources, trained in rangeland ecosystem management at the postgraduate level, to tackle the complex biodiversity interactions in the rangeland ecosystems.

The School of Agriculture, Earth and Environmental Sciences strongly believes in supporting advances in various aspects of rangeland science and community development practices in the rangeland ecosystem. There is increasing need to have well trained personnel with expertise in sustainable rangeland management, to provide leadership and stewardship for a sustainable framework for managing rangelands.

Rangelands can be described as land on which the vegetation
is predominantly grasses, grass-like plants, forbs or shrubs,
and often with trees that are grazed or have the potential to be
grazed by livestock and wildlife. They are diverse in their vegetation
driven by highly fluctuating rainfall, temperature and other climate
phenomena, and habitat for a wide range of wildlife, many species
of which are found nowhere else. Rangelands store vast amounts of
carbon and either originate or serve as freshwater catchment areas for

Climate change threatens the ability of global rangelands to provide food, support livelihoods and deliver important ecosystems services. The extent and magnitude of potential impacts are however poorly understood. In this study, we review the risk of climate impacts along the rangeland systems food supply chain. We also present results from biophysical modelling simulations and spatial data analyses to identify where and to what extent rangelands may be at climatic risk.

The challenges identified in the proposal of the CGIAR Research Program (CRP) on Livestock, for enhancing livestock production and productivity, have been the shortage of quality feeds, inefficient utilization of feed resources, degradation of rangelands, and lack of knowledge and skills of stakeholders in the feed production and utilization value chains. To address these challenges, the research and development work, innovations developed and tested, results-dissemination and concerted efforts towards capacity building have been presented in the following three main sections.