The Land We Graze

This report is the result of the co-operation of seventeen partners from four continents—all of them engaged in activities to improve the livelihoods of mobile livestock keepers. The organizing question of this collaboration was, how do mobile livestock keepers—i.e. pastoralists—succeed to organize themselves and to defend and secure their land rights.

Pastoralist land use and the entailing property and use rights are highly complex. They consist of an assemblage of different rights regarding access, management and control each encompassing different aspects of ‘property’. ‘Access’ includes the right to withdrawal, i.e. the right to use the land as a pasture; ‘management’ means the right to decide about the use made and to make improvements; ‘control’ in turn would include the right to decide about who may use the resource; but also absolute property as such. Accordingly, different rights on the same piece of land can be vested in different communities.