Pastoralists in Tanzania engaging in participatory mapping of rangeland resources (photo credit: ILRI/Fiona Flintan).
Managing interactions between environmental change and livestock systems through interventions such as sustainable rangeland use and improved land governance is a key focus of the Sustainable Livestock Systems program of the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI). The aim is to develop and promote research-based interventions that will protect and promote rational resource allocation and use, thereby improving livestock keepers’ livelihoods and resilience.
Through the International Land Coalition (ILC) Rangelands Initiative, the global component of which ILRI coordinates and supports, ILRI is taking its research agenda on adaptation and resilience a notch higher at the ongoing Annual World Bank Conference on Land and Poverty conference, the theme of which this year is ‘Responsible Land Governance—Towards an Evidence-Based Approach’. ILRI is one of the major partners supporting this premier global forum on land governance.
Fiona Flintan, a rangelands governance scientist at ILRI, is an author of three presentations at the conference and today, 24 Mar 2017, is leading a masterclass on the following topic: ‘Towards sustainable pastoralism through improving governance of pastoral lands: Implementation of the FAO VGGT Governance of Pastoral Lands’. Also today, Flintan is leading a meeting to deliberate on a call for an ‘International Year of Rangelands and Pastoralists’. These deliberations are being done in collaboration with other ILC members and partners including: Coalition of European Lobbies for Eastern African Pastoralism (CELEP), FAO-Pastoralist Knowledge Hub, International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN)-World Initiative for Sustainable Pastoralism, Rangelands Partnership, United Nations Environment Program (UNEP), World Bank and others.
ILRI has made considerable strides in facilitating inclusive participation of stakeholders to achieve sustainable rangeland use and to build rangeland resilience. For example, through the Sustainable Rangeland Management Project in Tanzania, ILRI has assisted nine villages to carry out village land-use planning and successfully pilot implementation of joint village planning across three of these villages, leading to the protection through certification of a shared grazing area called OLENGAPA, found in Kiteto district, Manyara region. Read more about this here.
Among other initiatives, ILRI’s research agenda in this area focuses on pro-poor land policy development and implementation. This includes institutional and governance dimensions for which partnerships with national governments and agencies as well as with non-governmental organizations are fundamental. Most recently, government–government dialogues have been facilitated between Ethiopia and Tanzania to promote and strengthen peer-to-peer sharing and learning among states.
This World Bank Conference on Land and Poverty has provided a much-needed forum to share lessons and identify opportunities for scaling up experiences for extensive adoption. The ILC Rangelands Initiative provided technical and financial support to eight other papers for the conference. ILRI and the World Bank will produce a joint proceedings of the rangeland papers delivered at the conference.
For more information on the Sustainable Rangeland Management Project, contact Fiona Flintan: f.flintan [at] cgiar.org
Download reports from the ILC Rangelands Initiative here
