Land and agrarian reform has the potential to expand South Africa's rangeland commons and enhance their contribution to the livelihoods of the rural poor, yet to a large extent this has been an opportunity missed. Shifting policy agendas have prioritised private land rights and commercial land uses, seeking to dismantle the racial divide between the white commercial farming areas and the ex-Bantustans by allocating former white farms to black farmers. These agendas and planning models reflect class and gender bias and a poor understanding of common property.

The creation of local institutions with a mandate over land access and control is seen as a prerequisite for successful decentralisation of land tenure and effective local resource management in sub-Saharan Africa. However, with land tenure reform in South Africa currently at a state of legislative impasse, real uncertainty now exists over land rights and governance of rangeland in many communal areas.

Although common disturbances of grazing lands like plant defoliation are expected to affect their sensitivity to increasing atmospheric CO2 concentration, almost no research has been conducted to evaluate how important such effects might be on the direct responses of rangelands to CO2. This growth chamber experiment subjected intact plant–soil cylinders from a Wyoming, USA, prairie to a 3‐way factorial of CO2 (370 vs. 720 μL L−1), defoliation (non‐clipped vs. clipped) and soil nitrogen (control vs. 10 g m−2 added N) under simulated natural climatic conditions.

Conservation auctions are a type of market-based instrument (MBI) that can achieve a more cost-efficient allocation of public funds than approaches such as devolved grants. In this paper, the conduct of a multiple round conservation auction to improve biodiversity management in a rangelands area is outlined. The auction was designed to develop a wildlife corridor across the southern Desert Uplands bioregion in Queensland and to improve management of rangelands areas. The conservation auction incorporated two important new design features.

Rangeland rehabilitation has multiple, sometimes conflicting goals, such as the reestablishment of the predisturbance vegetation, soil protection, and forage production. The rehabilitation techniques should be also cost‐effective and practicable. Given the difficulties and high costs of restoring Succulent Karoo rangelands and the continuously high grazing pressure in the communal lands, tradeoffs should be accepted in the achievement of these goals.

To mitigate the adverse effects of reduced access to public forage, ranchers may require financial or other forms of "compensation." In this paper, we use results from a survey of Nevada ranchers to examine their willingness to sell grazing permits and participate in other schemes that enable them to continue ranching in spite of declining access to public forage.

To document trends in land use and herbaceous production, 71 field sites sampled among cropped fields, fallow fields and rangelands in the Fakara region (Niger) were monitored from 1994 to 2006. The overall trend in land use confirmed the historical increase of the cropped areas since mid 20th century, at an annual rate of 2% from 1994 to 2006. This trend is the result of changes in the relative extent of fields permanently cropped and fields under shifting cultivation, and for the latter, the relative proportion of short (3 years) and long (10 years) duration fallows.

Dual‐scale analyses assessing farm‐scale patterns of ecological change and landscape‐scale patterns of change in vegetation cover and animal distribution are presented from ecological transect studies away from waterpoints, regional remotely sensed analysis of vegetation cover and animal numbers across the southern Kalahari, Botswana. Bush encroachment is prevalent in semi‐arid sites where Acacia mellifera Benth. is widespread in communal areas and private ranches, showing that land tenure changes over the last 40 years have not avoided rangeland degradation.

Expert judgements are potentially a valuable source of information in land degradation assessment, especially in areas where data paucity impedes the use of quantitative models. However, expert opinions are also much disputed because they are not tested for consistency, abstain from formal documentation, while their quantitative interpretation is inherently unidentifiable. This paper evaluates and formalizes the use of expert judgements to conduct a nationwide water erosion hazard assessment in Ethiopia.

The rapid population growth and ongoing development activities has resulted in natural resources demolition. However, the dynamics of the natural resources in relation to different biophysical and socio-economic factors are still remains poorly understood. The present study investigates the basic natural resources i.e. forest, rangeland and surface water bodies’ status using satellite data for the years 1990, 1998, and 2006, and their change detection in relation to biophysical and socio-economic factors.

Adaptive management is a way for managers to do their jobs in the face of uncertainty and learn by doing. Managers gain greater knowledge of their systems by testing different strategies during the management process. The term “adaptive management” is used often, but there is confusion about exactly what adaptive management is, and managers are hard-pressed to find any clear guidelines for implementing it.