Topic 3

Land dynamics and access to pastoral resources
 

Land issues are attracting greater attention from national policies and regional intervention programs in rural development, driven by demographic pressure, rural intensification, agricultural extensification, recognition of cross-border mobility, Agro-industrial investments ...

It is therefore important to open the debate on the scientific and political stakes of the interactions between these trends, these agendas, and the pastoralism.

The different economic, ecological and social productions of pastoralism need the support of politicians in the face of the major coming disturbances: drivers of climate change, climatic variations, financialization of agriculture and aid policies, structural changes of the rural worlds, regional security concerns. The developmental view of pastoralism has changed in the 20th century, from the colonial stigmatization of stagnation to the recognition of its adaptive faculties and then to the current praise of its resilience. However, although the pastoralism is better known by science and its inputs are better recognized institutionally, the policies and public actions implemented are still largely insufficient to preserve the coexistence of the systems of activities and production, taking into account the interactions and articulations between the different livestock and cropping systems in the face of the global changes to which arid and semi-arid zones can not escape.

Land use and land quest accelerates: what impacts? What are the stakes for pastoralism in the face of urbanization, agricultural expansion (reduced fallows, irrigated land, agribusiness), sedentarization policies and decentralization in Africa?

Which forms of collective analysis can be proposed for the sharing of access to resources, in order to integrate sustainability issues expressed at different scales and according to the different perceptions of the diversity of actors in the mobile and sedentary livestock breeding systems ?

What prospective support tools can be used to evaluate the different possibilities of land policies from the point of view of each stakeholders?

How to improve existing collaborative management models? Which problem resolution mechanisms should be promoted ?