11ZAQGM

Introduction
communities began, ultimately resulting in the redesignation of Soledo as a Village Land Forest Reserve in 2007,
with the responsibility for designing and enforcing sustainable forest management plans in the hands of local
Village Environment Committees.
6. Local initiatives are scalable and influential. Many community-based initiatives have achieved significant
scale, becoming models with relevance well beyond the villages where they originated. One of the most organic
and effective methods of scaling is peer-to-peer demonstration, where community groups themselves act as
mentors and learning resources for other communities facing a similar array of drylands management concerns.
When properly empowered and enabled, local initiatives can lead to the kind of scaling that creates landscapelevel
change and transforms economies. Many community-based initiatives successfully scale-up to become the
predominant governing bodies for entire ecosystems, wildlife corridors, and agricultural landscapes. This scaling
phenomenon refutes the common but mistaken view that local solutions invariably remain small in scope and
impact. They are often the foundation on which national progress towards development goals is built. When
scaled effectively, landscape-level changes become possible, and improvements in watershed conditions and
ecosystem productivity can be pursued at larger scales, with increasing benefit.
Torra and N≠a Jaqna Conservancies, for example, are two of Namibia’s 50 community conservancies—communal
lands where wildlife management authority has been devolved to local communities—now in existence in the
nation’s arid northern and eastern regions. The number of community conservancies scaled up rapidly from 4 in
1998 to 50 today as word spread of the economic and social benefits associated with conservancy status. Due
to this rapid growth, conservancies now cover some 14% of Namibia’s land area, allowing wildlife populations
to rebound over large areas, helping to preserve or restore large-scale migration patterns, and creating new
economic opportunities through ecotourism to supplement meager incomes from dryland agriculture.
As another example, from 1986 to 2004, the Shinyanga Soil Conservation Programme helped restore degraded
woodlands in the Shinyanga region of northern Tanzania, in part by reviving an indigenous land management
practice in which forest vegetation was preserved by communities in enclosures called “ngitili” for use as livestock
fodder during the dry season. While only 600 ha of documented ngitili remained at the Programme’s inception,
some 350,000 ha had been restored or created in over 800 villages by the Programme’s end in 2004, turning scrub
wastelands into recovering woodlands.
Community-Based Sustainable Land Management: Best Practices in Drylands from the Equator Initiative
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