Managing Communal Rangeland in Zimbabwe: Experiences and Lessons

Abstract

"The focus of this study is the social, legal and institutional dimensions of rangeland management in the Communal Lands of Zimbabwe, against the background of emerging perspectives on rangeland ecology. A great many interventions by the colonial and post-colonial state into communal area production systems and institutional regimes over the past 70 years have attempted to radically change livestock and grazing management practices, with either 'development' or conservation of natural resources as their stated rationale. Livestock owners have often resisted these innovations, however, and only recently has research begun to reveal some of the reasons for this resistance. These derive not so much from the so-called backwardness of peasant producers as from the technical inappropriateness of many of the suggested innovations: 'inappropriate', that is, from the point of view of producers with very different objectives to those of the commercial ranchers, the group which most livestock research in Zimbabwe has set out to service."