Grasslands of the World.pdf - Disasters and Conflicts - UNEP

The changing face of pastoral systems in grass-dominated ecosystems of eastern Africa 43
new type of land use to rangeland ecosystems : wildlife -only protected land. In
subsequent years, the Kenya Game Department transferred the management
of game reserves in Maasailand to local District Councils. After independence
in 1963, these reserves were designated “County Council Reserves” 3 (Lamprey
and Waller, 1990). Most of these conservation areas were established in the dry
season grazing reserve for pastoral people, livestock and wildlife. This change
in land tenure appropriated these critical resources for use by wildlife alone for
the first time.
Also in the mid-1960s, the Kenya Government gave pastoral groups title
deeds to large tracts of grazing land that they had used traditionally over a
long period (Lawrance Report, 1966). Each member shared ownership of the
entire ranch under the Group Representatives Act, 1968, but the livestock were
owned by individual members (Lamprey and Waller, 1990). Although these
ranches were large (Koyake Group Ranch in the Mara area is 971 km 2 ) and
group ranch boundaries were relatively porous to livestock and wildlife movement,
these group ranches started to circumscribe who could live where in the
ecosystem . The group ranch system was instituted more strongly in the wetter
rangelands in the south and just north of Mt. Kenya; arid rangelands further
northwest and northeast were largely unaffected by this change in tenure .
Since the early 1980s, group ranches have been adjudicated and are becoming
privatized (Galaty, 1994). Areas near towns and roads were the first to be
privatized. For example, the rangeland nearest to Nairobi was privatized in the
early 1980s, while other group ranches in drier areas are currently undergoing
subdivision. Pastoral land owners are struggling to balance the trade-offs of
private tenure : even though secure ownership is a boon, lack of access to wider
grazing lands and loss of wildlife are not. Groups and families are trying to
address these problems with reciprocal grazing arrangements and establishment
of community wildlife reserves . This process has partly been driven by
pastoral peoples throughout Kenya beginning to settle permanently to have
access to schools, health care and other business opportunities in the higher
potential areas. At the same time, pastoral people want to secure their ownership
rights as they see large tracts of communal land leased to outsiders for
mechanized agriculture.
Privatization of land in pastoral areas robs pastoral peoples of one of their
greatest assets: communal access to land . In the 1960s, Hardin (1968) decried
communal access to land, describing it as the “tragedy of the commons ”,
assuming that communal access meant free and unregulated access leading
to overuse. This has been used as an argument in favour of privatization.
3 Intitially established in the late 1940s as ‘National Reserves’ under Kenya Royal National
Parks, these areas were once again redesignated as national reserves under the 1976 Wildlife
(Conservation and Management) Act. However, they continued to be managed by county
councils.