Current Social and Rangeland Access Trends among Pastoralists in the Western Algerian Steppe

Slimane Bencherif,Mohamed Boumedienne Dahmani,Pablo Manzano,Daniel Burgas

doi:10.3390/land10070674

Slimane Bencherif, Mohamed Boumedienne Dahmani + Show 2 more

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https://doi.org/10.3390/land10070674

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Abstract

In the western Algerian steppe, the public authorities have carried out actions aimed at rural development (agricultural development programs) and combating desertification (grazing reserves) to counter the significant and rapid loss of vegetation cover of pastures by overgrazing, and the consequent impacts on local livelihoods. In the Rogassa area, these actions have impacted land tenure and the ancestral and collective way of land use and access. These changes have caused transformations in lifestyle and pasture management. This research aims to characterize how such changes are affecting local pastoralists and what their perceptions are about them. A selective sampling of 150 agropastoral households was carried out by interviewing their heads, analyzing socioeconomic, land tenure and government perception variables. Most agropastoralists access land under tribal tenure, conditioned by local social structures. Pastures are prevailingly perceived by pastoralists as insufficient, and the perception of grazing reserves is largely negative. Pastoralists are worried about land degradation and declining grazing lands, and are looking for solutions and alternatives. However, state interventions have been uncoordinated and have not considered their customary land rights. The generalized awareness of environmental deterioration points to the need for better communication and intervention strategies to be developed by authorities in the future that involve the inhabitants of these lands.

Highlights

Since the 1960s and 1970s, developing countries have often put policies and pastoral development initiatives in place that focus on the sedentarization of pastoral communities, on the redistribution of land tenure rights through nationalization, and/or the privatization of land [1,2]
For models of other response socio-economic variables recorded as categorical variables with order, we modelled them with Ordinal Logistic Regression (OLR)
This study shows that to cope with insufficient pasture to feed herds, less educated households with large livestock herds, educated households, and foreign investors with little or no land, try to take advantage of state aid programs to cultivate the land, feed their herds, acquire land concessions, and increase their capital

Summary

Introduction

Since the 1960s and 1970s, developing countries have often put policies and pastoral development initiatives in place that focus on the sedentarization of pastoral communities, on the redistribution of land tenure rights through nationalization, and/or the privatization of land [1,2]. Dynamic socio-ecological systems are efficiently managed through common pool resources (hereafter, CPRs). In the management of CPRs, individuals face a coordination problem of social dilemmas that risk incurring the unsustainable use of resources up to their depletion point [6,7] Such social dilemmas can be solved through the coordination of individuals if they communicate among themselves and monitor the resource state [8]. Access to CPRs is limited either by posing difficulties to its use (excludability), or by facilitating the appropriation of some resources by some users that cancels the possible use by later users (subtractability, [5]). The management of CPRs determines their sustainability and is shaped by both the resource itself and its community of users, including their social relationships and the established rules for its use [8,9,10]

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