Pastoralists’ perceptions and realities of vegetation change and browse consumption in the northern Kalahari, Namibia

Impact of rangeland degradation on the pastoral production systems, livelihoods and perceptions of the Somali pastoralists in Eastern Ethiopia

“…The shift from rangelands into bush/shrub lands as affected by various factors of degradation, has also affected the patterns in holding livestock species. The results also support findings by Sandford (1983), Ellis and Swift (1988), Katjiua and Ward (2007) and Hoffman et al (2007) on the wisdom of pastoralists in managing arid environments for livestock production, but did not agree with the paradigm described by Cossins (1985) and Letty et al (2003Letty et al ( , pp. 1677Letty et al ( -1679) that held pastoralists responsible for the degradation of arid ecologies, due to keeping an excess number of animals for prestige.…”

“…Farther social conflicts are often aggravated by population growth and associated pressures on land resources. Similar scenarios were also observed in sub-Saharan Africa (Herrmann and Hutchinson, 2005;Mortimore and Turner, 2005), North Africa (Behnke et al, 1993), the Awash Rift Valley of Ethiopia (Abule et al, 2005), South Africa (Hoffman et al, 2007), the Borana zone of southern Ethiopia (Gemedo-Dalle et al, 2006;Solomon et al, 2007) and in northern Kalahari of Namibia (Katjiua and Ward, 2007). Aronson et al (2006) also argued that the consequences of dwindling natural resources are increasingly widespread and the impacts are increasingly, disturbingly profound and far-reaching.…”

Pastoralists’ Perception and Ecological Knowledge on Savanna Ecosystem Dynamics in Semi-arid Botswana

“…Overgrazing, which refers to the overutilization of grazing resources, by livestock promotes the increase in undesirable herbaceous plant species and bush encroachment, which are all indicators of rangeland degradation (Katjiua and Ward 2007). Degradation is the permanent loss of rangeland's biological or economic productivity in arid and semi-arid environments (Thomas 2008).…”

Traditional Water Resource Management and Water Quality in Rural Tanzania

“…Communities where TRM continues to play a major role in the management of local social-ecological systems are diverse (Berkes et al 2000;Berkes 2008). However, most research has focused on forest management (Denevan et al 1984;Turner 1994) or hunting/ fishing resources (Seixas and Berkes 2003;Redford and Stearman 1993) and, in arid and semi-arid regions, on vegetation (Katjiua and Ward 2007), soil (Reij et al 1996) and water conservation (Pawluck et al 1992). 1 Traditional systems of resource management are vulnerable to disturbance when top-down policies are forced onto communities (Kamara et al 2004).…”