Livestock production is one of few options available to millions of impoverished people who live in arid and semi-arid areas of sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). Livestock are flexible and fungible: they can be moved in response to variable rainfall conditions and can be purchased or sold in response to variable market conditions. Livestock can supply animal traction and play key roles in the transfer and cycling of nutrients for crop production. At the same time, livestock production is often associated with low productivity and low offtake, with land degradation, and with resource conflicts among pastoral groups and between pastoralists and farmers.

One of the key characteristics of extensive and semi-extensive livestock production in the semi-arid regions is the high variability of rainfall both spatially and temporally, and the consequent high degree of drought vulnerability. Equally important is the fact that forage from common rangelands provides the vast majority of feed inputs in these systems. Early attempts at improving livestock productivity in these regions attempted to address the perceived problems with common property rangelands without considering the impact of high rainfall variability on different production strategies. Instead, low productivity and land degradation were assumed to be a function of the inability of the community to manage their resources. Typical policies undertaken in the 1970s and 1980s included the appropriation of rangeland by the state and the creation of ranching schemes. The former policy often led to encroachment by cultivators into pastoral areas or to open access situations where both non-traditional and traditional herders competed for the resource. Projects modeled on the ranch approach frequently generated negative rates of return, and have often been criticized on grounds of resulting inequitable distribution of access and use, usually favoring wealthier households.

Many of the problems associated with such policies are due to the lack of properly accounting for the role of mobility in sustaining livestock production in highly variable environments. In contrast with the traditional economics paradigm, which stresses the efficiency losses and environmental degradation that are likely to result under non-private tenure, many range ecologists and animal scientists instead focused on the resilience of rangeland ecosystems and the adaptability of pastoral societies. This led to the development of a school of thought now known as the “new range ecology,” which maintains that forage productivity is driven by climatic variables rather than stocking density, that semi-arid rangelands are in fact resilient and not fragile, that forage composition is patchy rather than evenly distributed spatially, and thus that an opportunistic, mobile grazing strategy is better suited to these environments than conservative, sedentary strategies.

And yet, though there is convincing evidence that the expansion of the Sahel during the 1980s was due more to rainfall than to overstocking, there is also evidence that high stocking densities can have a negative impact on forage productivity through changes in forage species composition, and that they also have a negative impact on within-period animal productivity. Therefore, there is a need to reconsider the incentives of individuals to use or misuse resources held in common in an expanded framework that accounts for risk aversion and the options for ex-post mobility. Finally, given the need for flexible community (and intra-community) management of resources, there is a need to understand the role of the state in devising and implementing comprehensive legal and institutional frameworks to effectively devolve authority and responsibility of resource management to the relevant level, as well as to clarify the role of non-governmental organizations in enhancing the capabilities of local communities to manage those resources.

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