The Syrian Arab Republic is a dry country that is prone to drought, with large areas of desert or semi-desert that are too fragile to be cultivated but will support grazing for a restricted number of livestock. These areas of ecological fragility, if overgrazed and poorly managed, can quickly become degraded and desertified and, in the worst case scenario, can eventually become biologically sterile. Many different factors have put pressure on these lands and upset systems of natural resource management that have been in place for centuries. The pressure of population growth is one of the major contributors to overgrazing, leading in turn to degradation. But conflict, political upheaval and poverty also lead to mismanagement of resources. At the same time, the effects of climate change are adding to the difficulty of maintaining productive and healthy rangelands. If management and rehabilitation are to be sustainable in the long term they must also be participatory, involving the farmers themselves in the restoration and management of the resources they depend upon. This was the rationale behind the IFAD-supported Badia Rangelands Development Project (BRDP), which ran from 1998 to 2010 and was cofinanced by the Arab Fund for Economic and Social Development. Lessons learned from projects implemented over the past four decades in Syria and many other countries in the region show that top-down decisions involving design and implementation that ignore the role of herders and traditional uses of the natural resources and infrastructure (especially water) do not result in sustainable changes.