The New Pastoral Development Paradigm: Engaging the Realities of Property Institutions and Livestock Mobility in Dryland Africa

This article focuses on a less explored reason for the failure new understandings to slow or reverse the erosion of pastoral production systems. Livestock mobility, decentralization, and the common property resource management (CPRM) lie at the heart of the new pastoral development paradigm. Following years of state-sponsored assaults on community-managed resources with concomitant declines in livestock mobility in dryland Africa, the provision of decision-making authority to rural peoples and improvements in the management of commonly held resources (such as pastures) are seen as key for new strategies to maintain flexible access to pastures and livestock mobility. Using the case of the Sudano-Sahelian West Africa, I argue that the overly abstracted treatments of livestock mobility and common property management in policy and scholarly analysis contribute to the continued failure of pastoral development and range management.