1. In recent years governments and donor agencies have devoted considerable resources to efforts to improve the management of communal grazing lands. Range and livestock projects have been designed to address such familiar pastoral problems as endemic overgrazing of rangelands, often leading to permanent degradation of vegetation, soils, and water resources, and reduced livestock productivity, adversely affecting the welfare of rural people. Many explanations have been offered for overgrazing and resource degradation. These include rapid human population growth; technological changes such as deep boreholes, which in some areas have overridden the natural systems constraints to the unchecked growth of herds; and social and economic changes in part resulting in the decline of traditional institutions that may have provided mechanisms for regulating or controlling access to rangelands (Bennett et al, 1986).
2. Whatever the complex of factors which have led to range degradation in Africa, policymakers and project designers very often see at least part of the solution in land tenure reform. New land tenure rules are seen as essential to correcting the problems associated with the perceived open access, free-for-all communal range use. This has led to a great variety of reform experiments, including individualization, as in the case of the Tribal Grazing Land Program in Botswana, group ranches in Kenya and elsewhere, as well as attempts to develop cooperative grazing systems, such as grazing associations, and the creation of administrative apparatus for controlling livestock number and movements through grazing permits (Bennett et al, 1986; Lawry, 1983; Oxby, 1981; Galaty, 1980).
