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Abstract
Close to one billion people worldwide depend directly upon the drylands for their
livelihoods. Because of their climatic conditions and political and economic
marginalization drylands also have some of the highest incidents of poverty. Pastoral and
sedentary production systems coexist in these areas and both very often use common
property arrangements to manage access and use of natural resources. Despite their
history of complementary interactions, pastoralists and sedentary farmers are increasingly
faced with conflicting claims over land and other natural resources. Past policy
interventions and existing regulatory frameworks have not been able to offer lasting
solutions to the problems related to land tenure and resource access; problems between
the multiple and differentiated drylands resource users, as part of broader concerns over
resource degradation and the political and economic marginalization of the drylands.
This paper discusses enduring tension in efforts to secure rights in drylands. On
the one hand are researchers and practitioners who advocate for statutory law as the most
effective guarantor of rights, especially of group rights. On the other side are those who
underscore the complexity of customary rights and the need to account for dynamism and
flexibility in drylands environments in particular. It explores innovative examples of
dealing with secure access to resources and comes to the conclusion that process, rather
than content, should be the focus of policy makers. Any attempt to secure access for
multiple users in variable drylands environments should identify frameworks for conflict
resolution, in a negotiated manner, crafting rules from the ground upwards, in addition to
a more generalized or generic identification of rights. Elite capture and exclusion of
women and young people continue to pose significant challenges in such decentralized
processes. For rights to be meaningfully secured there is need to identify the nature and
sources of threats that create insecurities.