This report is a compilation of primary and secondary sources of information, evidences and facts collected through consultative meetings and interviews with CSOs and Community members. More information was obtained from different credible sources including the UN treaty bodies, UN special procedures, ACHPR, government reports, media as well as reports of fact finding missions of pastoralists’ CSOs members. Validation was done by pastoralist CSOs and National CSOs in two different meetings

This report provides an overview of the conflict in Loliondo, reviewing historical information, current land uses and tenure arrangements. 

Niger is a pastoral country. However, despite its crucial economic, social and cultural impact, pastoralism remains a very uncertain activity, and Niger’s successive governments didn’t invest much in it (1% of the national budget in 2009, versus 35% for farming activities). Though from 1993 the Rural Code has produced a number of rules and regulations in order to protect and revitalize pastoralism, it was also often accused of favoring crop farmers over livestock producers. Is that true ?

This paper presents several case studies to show how the Ujamaa Community Resource Team (UCRT) has been working within Tanzania’s legal and policy framework to support a diverse range of pastoralists, agro-pastoralists and hunter-gatherers, all of whom face fundamental threats from external appropriation of, or encroachment on, lands and natural resources. The work also responds to local needs to rationalise resource use rights amongst competing local groups, such as farmers and livestock keepers.

Given its seemingly beneficial aspects to socioeconomic development and environmental well-being, the legislative reforms initiated under the Land Act of Bhutan, 2007 have raised so much consternation as well as hope in the minds of the Bhutanese people who either depend on livestock husbandry or leasing out such rights to others with livestock and compensated with payment in cash or kind in the form of livestock products.

This paper looks at how recent economic and legal changes have affected pasture management and property rights in Tajikistan. Firstly, current trends in livestock numbers and mobility are compared with those of the Soviet period. Secondly, the impact of current land legislation is investigated using 2007 field data from two sites in the Gorno-Badakhshan region of the country. We describe the extent to which pasture at these sites is under private, community or state control and discuss the implications for sustainable management of this resource.

The pastoral areas of Ethiopia are witnessing radical change in terms of both increasingly restricted mobility and access to vital resources. A cause and consequence of such constraints has been a move toward sedentarised forms of livestock and agricultural production. This is occurring in a political and socioeconomic vacuum, in which the customary institutions responsible for resource allocation and access to land are becoming weaker, and where the Ethiopian government has yet to develop a clear policy or strategy for resource distribution and tenure security in pastoral areas.

This urgent alert is based on the forceful evictions of Maasai pastoralists from their homes and grazing lands in Loliondo Division, Ngorongoro District in Northern Tanzania and the gross human rights violations that are being committed. 

The eviction operation started on the 4th July 2009 and was conducted by the notorious riot police, the Field Force Unit, with assistance of private guards from the Otterlo Business Cooperation (OBC). They entered the villages by shooting in the air and using teargas before pouring petrol on the Maasai homes and setting them on fire.

IWGIA has recently been informed by local partners in Tanzania that a government operation aimed at forcefully removing pastoralists from the Kilosa district in the Morogoro Region in southern Tanzania started on the 29.1.2009. The Tanzanian government wants to remove all pastoralists from Kilosa district and, according to some sources, the whole of Morogoro Region, and force them to other areas of Tanzania. Such areas have though, according to IWGIA local partners as yet not been specified, and the affected families do not know where to go to.

It is almost a decade now since the fights between Pastoralists and peasants broke out in Kilosa district Morogoro region in December 2000 claiming tens of people’s lives and causing irreparable losses and damages their properties. While the wounds of that dark record are still fresh in some of the minds of the communities in Kilosa, another very serious fight between the same or rather similar groups occurred this October prompting the media and human rights activists to find some ways to intervene in a bid to find lasting solutions for the problems.

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union and agricultural decollectivisation, post-socialist rural contexts have afforded commons scholars particularly fertile ground for examination of institutional change and evolution under new modes of governance. In Mongolia, as elsewhere, such transformations have been characterised by the erosion of state influence and de jure and/or de facto devolution of land and resource rights.

This paper developed from an articulated process to address the rights to land of pastoral groups, within a holistic perspective and accounting for changes brought about by climate change. It brings together the inputs made by over 120 participants in a web-based forum organised in 2006 and managed by the International Land Coalition on pastoral land rights. Further materials and lessons have been drawn from a number of projects and experiences all around the world, in order to provide a comprehensive update about the rights of nomadic and pastoralist groups and natural resources.