Transcending Landscapes: Working Across Scales and Levels in Pastoralist Rangeland Governance

Lance W Robinson,Enoch Ontiri,Tsegaye Alemu,Stephen S Moiko

doi:10.1007/s00267-017-0870-z

Lance W Robinson, Enoch Ontiri + Show 2 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1007/s00267-017-0870-z

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Abstract

Landscape approaches can be subjected to mistakenly targeting a single “best” level of governance, and paying too little attention to the role that cross-scale and cross-level interactions play in governance. In rangeland settings, resources, patterns of use of those resources, and the institutions for managing the resources exist at multiple levels and scales. While the scholarship on commons offers some guidance on how to conceptualize governance in rangeland landscapes, some elements of commons scholarship—notably the “design principles” for effective governance of commons—do not seem to apply neatly to governance in pastoralist rangeland settings. This paper examines three cases where attempts have been made to foster effective landscape governance in such settings to consider how the materiality of commons influences the nature of cross-scale and cross-level interactions, and how these interactions affect governance. In all three cases, although external actors seemed to work appropriately and effectively at community and landscape levels, landscape governance mechanisms have been facing great challenges arising from relationships beyond the landscape, both vertically to higher levels of decision-making and horizontally to communities normally residing in other landscapes. The cases demonstrate that fostering effective landscape-level governance cannot be accomplished only through action at the landscape level; it is a task that must be pursued at multiple levels and in relation to the connections across scales and levels. The paper suggests elements of a conceptual framework for understanding cross-level and cross-scale elements of landscape governance, and offers suggestions for governance design in pastoralist rangeland settings.

Highlights

Among the premises on which community-based natural resource management (CBNRM) is based are the ideas that sustainable use of natural resources is possible and that local resource users are often better able to manage resources than the state or distant corporate managers (Brosius et al 1998)
We conclude that fostering effective landscape-level governance is a task that must be pursued at multiple levels and in relation to the connections across scales and levels, and we offer suggestions as how this might be done in pastoralist settings
Even the subjective impression that the property rights of group ranches are second class property rights highlights that the challenges are in terms of horizontal relationships to other communities and the extent to which these other communities respect the legitimacy of the group ranch and its rights over its territory and in terms of vertical relationships to government at county and national level and the extent to which they legitimize and enforce de jure governance powers of the group ranch. In each of these three cases, there was a pre-existing, socially relevant landscape which afforded a geographic scope for the interventions

Summary

Introduction

Among the premises on which community-based natural resource management (CBNRM) is based are the ideas that sustainable use of natural resources is possible and that local resource users are often better able to manage resources than the state or distant corporate managers (Brosius et al 1998). Landscape approaches involve applying tools, methods, concepts, and approaches in order to better understand and manage the interconnections among different land uses to achieve diverse objectives and secure benefits for diverse stakeholders (Sayer et al 2013; Kozar et al 2014; Minang et al 2015) Behind these ecosystem and landscape-based approaches is the idea that past interventions have often focused on interventions at a too small a scale: agricultural development has tended to emphasize the farm or at most the village level (Milder et al 2014); CBNRM and commons scholarship have tended to focus on local, often villagelevel, commons (Purcell and Brown 2005; Berkes 2009).

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