Indigenous, local people and pastoralists are best positioned to overcome degradation of the world’s drylands.  This was one of the key messages that pastoralists, the World Initiative for Sustainable Pastoralism, the World Conservation Union (IUCN) and UNCCD focal points from several Southern African countries communicated to policy makers at a recent conference of the UN Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) in Buenos Aires.
Land degradation and poverty are common phenomena in the world’s drylands. However, inappropriate development has exacerbated the degradation of drylands and in consequence increased poverty. Pastoralists – nomadic herders of sheep, goats and camels – have for centuries used the drylands sustainably. By moving on to new grazing places when resources got scarce, they prevented overgrazing or soil erosion.
However, these sophisticated management systems, where local people use an enormous amount of in-depth traditional knowledge on climate, soil, livestock, geography, plant and water resources, have been considered as backward and are replaced in favor of highly subsidized ranching and other agricultural activities.
Customary management knowledge and institutions have been weakened
Whereas pastoralists and other local livelihood strategies commonly managed the land, the newly established farms and ranches fence their land and water resources and make pasture land scarce. In addition, customary management institutions and knowledge are often weakened through state control of resources, as a result of inappropriate aid interventions and incomplete democratization as well as through the emergence of new elites that are not beholden to the customary institutions.
“Empowering local and customary institutions implies putting decision making power back into the hands of the resource user and enabling them to capitalize on their rich traditional knowledge systems,” said Ms. Brigitte Schuster, Programme Officer of the World Conservation Union office in Botswana.
“New policies need to be developed that provide resource and land tenure security,” concluded Mr. Sem Shikongo, Focal Point of the UN Convention to Combat Desertification. This comment was specifically made in connection with Community Based Natural Resources Management in the Southern African Region.
In Mongolia, customary decision making institutions have recovered thanks to favourable policy decision, with the result of improved rangelands and increased biodiversity. The same situation has been observed in Tanzania and Bolivia.
Pastoralism – an effective and sophisticated system of resource management
One of the drylands management systems is pastoralism, the extensive production of livestock, characterized by mobility and communal management. .
“Pastoralism has been practiced in many of the world’s drylands for centuries and many drylands environments are grazing-dependent. Yet those environments are often degraded, since the capacity of pastoralists to effectively manage their resource base is not recognized,” said Jonathan Davies of the World Conservation Union office in Nairobi.
“Pastoralists have very sophisticated knowledge and skills for managing their environment. Their skills may have limitations in transferability outside their system, but within their system they know how things work, they know what to do, and they have institutions that help them to put this into practice,” said Mrs. Khadija Razavi of the Centre for Sustainable Development & Environment (Cenesta), Islamic Republic of Iran.
The World Conservation Union also stressed the need to include other resource users into the debate, such as South African communities that depend on and utilize natural resources such as wildlife and plant resources in communal lands either for subsistence use or income-generation. These communities, like pastoralists, have developed intensive knowledge on how to manage their natural resources sustainably.
Community Based Natural Resource Management devolves rights to local users
“What is needed is respect for community knowledge and decision making for sustainable land management. This includes both Community Based Natural Resource Management (CBNRM) and empowerment of local and customary institutions for resource allocation and decision making,” said Brigitte Schuster, Programme Officer of the World Conservation Union office in Botswana. “CBNRM is a strategy that devolves rights to local users in order for them to benefit from their natural resources, and thus to have the incentive for the sustainable use.”
“Community Based Natural Resource Management is not a panacea for all development, but it needs to be embedded into a holistic livelihoods strategy,” added Ms. Mutsa Chasi, Director, Department of Natural Resources of the Ministry of Mines, Environment and Tourism, Zimbabwe. Communal management of natural resources can contribute significantly not only to sustainable resource use, but also to poverty reduction and adaptation to climate change and other risks.
Community level solutions provide an important means by which the National Action Programmes of the UNCCD can be made deliverable. CBNRM and related approaches need to be given more attention by the UNCCD, in order to make them more relevant to natural resource users. 
At the 5th meeting of the Committee for the Review of the Implementation (CRIC5) of the UNCCD in Buenos Aires, the importance of communal land and resource management has been the focus of advocacy by IUCN and its project partners. Following arguments brought forward by the Global Environment Facility, the UN Development Programme, and the IUCN World Initiative for Sustainable Pastoralism, the CRIC5 Chairman recommended that the Committee for Science and Technology recognizes the importance of pastoralists for effective rangelands management.