Transcending Landscapes: Working Across Scales and Levels in Pastoralist Rangeland Governance

Abstract

Landscape approaches can be subjected to mistakenly targeting a single “best” level of governance, and paying too little attention to the role that cross-scale and cross-level interactions play in governance. In rangeland settings, resources, patterns of use of those resources, and the institutions for managing the resources exist at multiple levels and scales. While the scholarship on commons offers some guidance on how to conceptualize governance in rangeland landscapes, some elements of commons scholarship—notably the “design principles” for effective governance of commons—do not seem to apply neatly to governance in pastoralist rangeland settings. This paper examines three cases where attempts have been made to foster effective landscape governance in such settings to consider how the materiality of commons influences the nature of cross-scale and cross-level interactions, and how these interactions affect governance. In all three cases, although external actors seemed to work appropriately and effectively at community and landscape levels, landscape governance mechanisms have been facing great challenges arising from relationships beyond the landscape, both vertically to higher levels of decision-making and horizontally to communities normally residing in other landscapes. The cases demonstrate that fostering effective landscape-level governance cannot be accomplished only through action at the landscape level; it is a task that must be pursued at multiple levels and in relation to the connections across scales and levels. The paper suggests elements of a conceptual framework for understanding cross-level and cross-scale elements of landscape governance, and offers suggestions for governance design in pastoralist rangeland settings.

Towards Place-Based Research to Support Social–Ecological Stewardship

“…Accordingly, we suggest that landscapes are place-based social-ecological systems that emerge from the interactions between people, through their values and institutions, with land-based ecosystems and the natural resources they generate [22,49]. The boundaries of landscapes are variously defined, for example by catchment boundaries, the boundaries of an area with a unique or coherent character, or as a sub-unit of a natural or jurisdictional region [50].…”

Identifying ranching landscape values in the Calgary, Alberta region: Implications for land‐use planning

“…This study also illustrates the "geographical boundedness" (Leyshon 2014, 720) of landscape values, underscoring the need for place-based approaches to land-use planning that are sensitive to social, cultural, economic, and political contexts (see also Robinson et al 2017). More specifically, the findings reported here have the capacity to contribute to an ongoing conversation vis-a-vis land-use and regional planning in the greater Calgary region and beyond.…”

Open property and complex mosaics: Variants in tenure regimes across pastoralist social-ecological systems

“…One discrepancy between mainstream commons theory and what is observed in pastoralist systems relates to the first Ostrom design principle. Many traditional pastoralist systems have neither clear territorial boundaries or social group boundaries (Niamir-Fuller 1999;Cousins 2000;Quinn et al 2007;Robinson et al 2017). Instead, flexibility and fuzziness of boundaries is the norm.…”

“…Laikipia County in northern Kenya for example, has a mosaic of tenure types, for the most part with welldefined boundaries (Glew 2012;Wade 2015), which in theory should provide for some degree of tenure security and certainty. Yet it has been argued that the tenure system operating in Laikipia is not well-adapted to the social-ecological conditions of the wider landscape within which it is set (Robinson et al 2017). The problem for efforts to establish clearly demarcated commons in pastoralist rangelands is not simply one of territories that have been created too small for the extensive nature of pastoralist production.…”

“…Yet research on pastoralists has repeatedly disputed the applicability of this principle to pastoralist governance systems (e.g. Quinn et al 2007;Moritz et al 2013a;Robinson et al 2017). In traditional pastoralist systems, norms and institutions emphasize flexibility and access to resources rather than secure ownership and clearly defined social and territorial boundaries (Cousins 2000;Fernández-Giménez and Le Febre 2006;Robinson and Berkes 2010).…”