Communal area grazing strategies: institutions and traditional practices

Opportunities for improving Nguni cattle production in the smallholder farming systems of South Africa

“…On the same note, loss in animal condition during winter was largely attributed to decline in feed quality, which was more marked in communal and sweet rangeland areas. The observation that feed quality was more marked in the communal areas, where gazing lands are small and controlled by traditional leaders than in the smallscale communities, where grazing lands are large and controlled by grazing committees was also reported by Moyo et al (2008). Research on the potential of various community institutions to manage and monitor the use of communally owned grazing resources should, therefore be investigated (Mapiye et al, 2006).…”

“…Currently, the impact of fencing is undermined by vandalism, theft and the absence of local by-laws and if available, poor mechanisms of enforcing these by-laws (Moyo et al, 2008;Nqeno, 2008). Research on how to appropriately design and effectively implement local by-laws to govern communal rangelands should, therefore, be prioritised.…”

Fenced in: Common property struggles in the management of communal rangelands in central Eastern Cape Province, South Africa

“…Ainslie, 1999;Peden, 2005;Allsopp et al, 2007;Moyo et al, 2008), we are only beginning to understand the effect this legacy of systematic state planning has had on the way common property grazing resources are now held and managed in communal areas. Nevertheless, the South African government has enacted legislation, such as the Communal Property Associations (CPA) Act (1996) and, more recently, the Communal Land Rights Act (CLRA) (2004), which seeks to acknowledge and give legal status to the ownership and management of land on a communal basis.…”

Cooperation and collapse in a communal livestock production SES model – A case from South Africa

“…At the same time, this paper attempts to emphasize the importance of local specificity embedded in empirical data. Generally, model results underpin the necessity of considering the socio-economic, ecological and institutional factors involved in the complexity of the rangeland commons if the ultimate goal is to arrive at management guidance (Moyo et al, 2008) A major shortcoming of our model is its inability to model the emergence of novelty in constitutional institution building. That is, the normative behaviour modelled here builds on what was in place and cannot account for what might develop.…”