The legalization of land tenure acts as an incentive for the environmentally sound use of rangelands on the part of herders. Land tenure is a condition or form of right or title to land, and consists of systems that control and organize access to resources. In recent years, herders’ customary systems of resource tenure have been undermined by population increases, economic changes and government policies, including nationalization, sedentarization and privatization.

The nationalization of pastoral resources has created the very tragedy of the commons that it was intended to overcome. The sedentarization of herders, through resettlement and irrigation schemes, has also curbed traditional mobility and disrupted risk management strategies such as migration. Although the privatization of land may provide herders with an asset that can be used as collateral for loans, the expense of the land titling process has meant that privatization has frequently benefited only the better-off groups. Furthermore, it has sometimes been misused to sell pastoralist land to outsiders.

IFAD must, therefore, find ways to support appropriate tenure frameworks and existing resource management traditions, and to provide the conditions to support re-establishment in areas where the customary institutions have been destroyed. Such support is particularly needed in Asian and East European countries that are shifting from central planning to market economies. In such countries, IFAD’s strategy has been to encourage governments to speed up the process by establishing the legal foundation for judicial use and management of grazing resources. Similarly, one of the objectives of the Kidal Food and Income Security Programme in Mali was to participate in a regional initiative to clarify and codify pastoral land tenure, with experimental distribution of dry-season pastures to pilot cooperative sectors or smaller groupings.

Programmes aimed at introducing secure land tenure for pastoralists face formidable difficulties. Resource and user rights are very complex in most traditional pastoral systems. Project planners must be able to understand existing systems if customary institutions are to be supported rather than undermined. Interventions must rely upon national and local state institutions to give legal status to pastoralist land tenure, and projects and programmes must both encourage consultation with other land users such as farmers and hunters and, most importantly, involve the pastoralists themselves. Any reforms are likely to depend upon the existence of strong, democratic, participatory herder organizations that are capable of sharing and administering the land. IFAD’s customary emphasis on association development has done much to improve the land tenure situation in project areas.

Relevant IFAD Projects