Classic theories suggest that common pool resources are subject to overexploitation. Community-based resource management approaches may ameliorate tragedy of the commons effects. Here we use a randomized evaluation in Namibia’s communal rangelands to study a comprehensive four-year program to support community-based rangeland and cattle management. We find that the program led to persistent and large improvements for eight of thirteen indices of social and behavioral outcomes. Effects on rangeland health, cattle productivity and household economics, however, were either negative or nil. Positive impacts on community resource management may have been offset by communities’ inability to control grazing by non-participating herds and inhibited by an unresponsive rangeland sub-system. This juxtaposition, in which measurable improvements in community resource management did not translate into better outcomes for households or rangeland health, demonstrates the fragility of the causal pathway from program implementation to intended socioeconomic and environmental outcomes. It also points to challenges for improving climate change–adaptation strategies.

Rangelands comprise approximately 50% of ecologically intact landscapes available to mitigate biodiversity loss and to provide natural climate solutions. However, their planetary value is often overshadowed by local priorities on select provisioning services. A transformative stewardship strategy will require an inversion of priorities placed on ecosystem service categories supplied by rangelands.

Farming systems of western Nepal are home to isolated, poverty-stricken people who must cope with weak agricultural extension services and negative effects of climate change. Our research objective was to identify, implement, and assess a suite of interventions promoting climate change preparedness and poverty reduction for two traditional farming communities in Bajura District. Participatory processes were first used to identify priority problems and solutions. Residents then received an intervention package implemented over 16 months that was targeted for problem solving and founded on non-formal education (NFE) training modules. Following the intervention period, a random sample of households gave their trend perceptions for 24 socioeconomic and agroecosystem attributes, and findings were compared with those from adjacent control communities lacking interventions in a quasi-experimental approach. Results indicated that community-based participation was an effective diagnostic research tool that allowed priority problems to be ranked and linked to either climate change or other factors of under-development. This sharpened our focus for the intervention phase. The intervention package had positive effects (P <= .047) on 23 of 24 attributes with particularly notable impacts on altering previous attitudes and beliefs, improving skill sets, boosting cash incomes, and supporting a more diversified mix of agricultural enterprises largely based on existing technologies. Improved goat production and marketing, however, was the main driver for socioeconomic change. In sum, improved risk management, widespread adoption of a planning mentality, and expansion of community-based collaborations were keys to success. We estimated that the intervention package was generally inexpensive, costing from US$ 1.48 to 4.75 per beneficiary. We concluded that use of participatory processes and NFE-based interventions can achieve impact quickly here. These are important means to build human capacity and community resilience, especially in places where implementation of novel, climate-smart agricultural technologies is difficult.

Classic theories suggest that common pool resources are subject to overexploitation. Community-based resource management approaches may ameliorate “tragedy of the commons” effects. Using a randomized evaluation in Namibia’s communal rangelands, we find that a comprehensive four-year program to support community-based rangeland and cattle management led to persistent and large improvements for eight of thirteen indices of social and behavioral outcomes. But effects on rangeland outcomes, cattle productivity and household economics were either negative or nil. Positive impacts on community resource management may have been offset by communities’ inability to control grazing by non-participating herds and inertia in the rangeland sub-system. This juxtaposition, in which measurable improvements in community resource management did not translate into better outcomes for households or ecosystem health, demonstrates the fragility of the causal pathway from program implementation to intended socioeconomic and environmental outcomes. It also points to challenges for improving climate change adaptation strategies.

Because drought impacts are accelerating due to climate change, drought preparedness on western rangelands matters now more than ever. Range professionals perceive, however, that many Utah ranchers remain ill-equipped for drought. The main research objective was to determine why ranchers often don't adopt recommended drought-mitigation tactics. Another objective was to clarify how grazing is managed during drought on federal lands. Fourteen tactics studied included management of water, forage, herds, and finances and access to information and government programs. Data collection included surveys of 429 ranchers and interviews of seven federal employees. Data analysis used descriptive statistics and logistic regression. Results indicated that 3,133 non-adoption decisions were heavily dominated by the perceived incompatibility between tactics and operational needs; producer situations may often be misunderstood by experts. Weather forecasting tools were typically regarded by ranchers as “too complex,” while Extension information was often viewed as “not useful.” Factors promoting drought preparedness included having a strong livestock-business orientation or a drought-planning mentality. Factors hindering drought preparedness were dominated by advancing rancher age. Grazing permittees benefit from federal drought early-warning systems, yet herd adjustments on allotments were rare during the 2019 drought, pushing forage utilization to the limits. While challenges appear daunting, there are opportunities to enhance drought preparedness, prominently including creative efforts to promote more education and mentoring on operational drought management. Comprehensive, user-friendly drought websites remain rare, yet they can be vital hubs for stakeholders. Such websites must meet diverse communication needs including a greater focus on information requirements of seniors. Drought policies for ranchers should: (1) Eliminate perverse incentives that foster inappropriate risk taking; (2) reward pro-active, risk-management behaviors; and (3) facilitate recruitment of a younger, innovative cohort of new producers. Updating federal management plans could support grazing adjustments that incorporate more grass banking. Unified drought-response guidelines could harmonize agency approaches.

This Review assesses the adequacy of current stewardship strategies to address the accelerating challenges confronting global rangeland systems. The assessment was conducted through the lens of the rangeland ecology debate that was initiated in the late 1980s to determine whether equilibrial or non-equilibrial models more accurately represented the ecological dynamics of rangeland systems. The following lessons have emerged from this prolonged debate: (a) equilibrial and non-equilibrial dynamics among plants and herbivores always coexist in individual systems; (b) herbivore persistence is strongly influenced by functional resource heterogeneity; (c) biotic feedbacks are highly dependent upon spatial and temporal scale; (d) multiple stable states separated by nonlinear trajectories may coexist on individual ecological sites and (e) management and policy decisions can have important consequences for rangeland systems despite high environmental stochasticity. These lessons demonstrate that scale and functional heterogeneity were critical 'blind spots' within the traditional rangeland profession. In contrast, pastoral strategies recognized these system variables as essential for exploitation of heterogeneous resource distribution, rather than assuming stable, uniform resource distribution. These divergent perceptions of scale and heterogeneity in grazed ecosystems largely explain the disparate interpretations of ecological carrying capacity that was central to the debate. Programmes supporting supplemental feeding and infrastructure development have created an anthropogenic category of non-equilibrial dynamics by sustaining large numbers of livestock during droughts. These programmes decouple livestock and rangeland resources to create an additional stewardship dilemma regarding complex trade-offs between livestock production and the capacity of systems to provision a broad array of global ecosystem services. Synthesis and applications. The fundamental challenge facing the global rangeland community may not be identification of a unified model of rangeland ecology-as assumed during the rangeland debate. Rather, the challenge may be how to best transform rangeland social-ecological systems to provide optimal combinations of ecosystem services to meet the needs of global citizens, while improving the well-being of millions of rangeland residents who are highly dependent upon provisioning services. A comprehensive accounting of rangeland ecosystem services, supported by institutional governance and delivered as state-community partnerships, may provide the foundation for an alternative stewardship strategy to pursue this critical goal.

Public opinion about climate change is sharply polarized in the U.S., where Republicans and political conservatives are significantly more likely to doubt the threat and severity of global climate change than Democrats and liberals. However, opinion polls have consistently shown that support for renewable energy - an essential climate mitigation strategy - is far more widespread across the U.S. public and is significantly less politically polarizing. We examine the role of partisanship and partisan identity in individuals' stances toward climate change, renewable energy, and policy using a mixed methods approach including survey data (n = 1508) and semi-structured interviews of political conservatives (n = 26). We find that while political divisions exist for climate change views and renewable energy usage and policy support, partisanship was significantly less important for renewable energy support. Our interview data reveal that many, but not all, aspects of renewable energy are compatible with conservative political identity, while far fewer aspects of climate change are acceptable across the political spectrum. This study has implications for engendering public support for renewable energy development amongst conservatives and suggests that the less renewable energy is discursively and politically linked to climate mitigation, the broader support its expansion will have.

Humans have shaped carnivore behavior since at least the Middle Paleolithic period, about 42,000 years ago. In more recent times, spotted hyenas (Crocuta crocuta) in Ethiopia have adapted to living in urban areas, while humans have adapted to living with hyenas. Yet, relationships between coexisting humans and carnivores are rarely addressed beyond mitigating conflicts. We provided a case study for how to broadly think about coexistence and how to study it when measuring if humans and carnivores affect one another. We collected data in four Ethiopian cities: Mekelle, Harar, Addis Ababa, and Arba Minch. We held focus groups and key informant interviews that incorporated feedback from 163 people, representing a wide array of religious, economic, and educational backgrounds. We also determined how many hyenas resided in these cities, hyena behavioral responses to humans using a flight initiation test, and problem-solving abilities via puzzle box trials. We found that in three of the cities, hyenas and humans coexist at high densities and frequently encounter each other. While all participants recognized the importance of hyenas as scavengers to maintain a clean environment, there was pronounced variation in cultural perspectives across cities. For example, while the people of Harar revere hyenas in spiritual terms, in Arba Minch hyenas were regarded as nuisance animals. Hyenas were universally respected as a formidable predator across cities but reports of attacks on livestock and humans were few. Flight initiation tests revealed hyenas fled at significantly closer distances in Harar and Addis Ababa than in Mekelle. Hyenas succeeded at solving a puzzle box in Harar but not in Mekelle. These variable behavior in hyenas correlated to different human perceptions. Our case study results suggest that the hyena–human dynamic is highly variable across these locations. We conclude by exploring the implications of these findings for how humans and hyenas can shape one another’s behavior. Developing studies to link human perceptions and animal behavior could advance wildlife conservation, especially in urban areas.

The drylands of the Global South are facing challenges from human population growth, unsustainable land-management practices, and climate change. Such problems are complex and can no longer be adequately addressed using traditional, top-down means. Rather, increased reliance on public participation is needed to better identify key research questions and interventions that promote positive change. Major actors in these approaches would include communities, applied researchers, outreach agents, policy makers, and planners working in tandem. The process involves embracing "engaged research" within a framework of an "innovation system"-referred to here by the acronym ERIS. Such concepts have recently gained acceptance, and now is the time to implement them. Project donors are key to this transformation of applied research and professional practice because they can provide incentives. ERIS projects must be long term with a diversity of pragmatic and transdisciplinary scholarly achievements. An ERIS platform for inter-project coordination could be part of a comprehensive Agadir platform. The main option to institutionalize ERIS approaches is via policies that alter how government agencies and their stakeholders work together.

For the purpose of achieving sustainable development in the context of a changing climate, the development and implementation of tripartite cooperation tools, into a transatlantic cooperation framework, is the crux of a project to bring about a transdisciplinary platform focused on research, technology, and innovation in drylands. It finds its roots in the Agadir Declaration of May 2016. The objective of the platform is to set up a "hub or rear base" at the University of Ibn Zohr in Agadir to develop transdisciplinary research and training mechanisms on climate change and its impacts on the functioning of ecosystems and their goods and services in arid and semiarid regions. Currently, the main challenge to achieve sustainable development resides in ensuring that decision-making processes are supported by science. How to translate scientific knowledge on complex long-term issues at the national, cross-regional, and transatlantic scale into better informed public policy remains an open question for multi-sectoral partnerships. The main thread underlying this chapter relates to the establishment of interface models between science and policy: what challenges will the Agadir Platform assume to bridge various forms of interdisciplinary science and policy expertise to inform decision-makers on long-term wicked problems related to drylands socio-ecological systems?

Drylands are the largest biome complex on Planet Earth and home to over 40% of the human population. Their extraordinary high biotic and cultural richness is endangered by global climate change, land use pressures including coastal/marine systems, and environmental degradation. Understanding and maintaining the functional integrity of dryland socio-ecological systems (DSES) is fundamental for sustainable development. It requires resilience-based dryland stewardship, where land users, managers and decision-makers incorporate change, as understood from the multiple actors’ perspective of a SES, into their planning and governance. The linkage of America’s drylands with west Africa and Southern Europe is often overseen, however increasing economic activities in these DSES have enormous impacts on their functional integrity. In response to this daunting task, academic and government institutions founded the Agadir Platform as a coordinating instrument for cooperation in the Global South. As focal node of this platform, Mexico established the first international network to co-generate knowledge through transdisciplinary research partnerships. We present the conceptual framework of this network highlighting 1) the socio-ecological system’s approach, 2) the transdisciplinary scope of participatory research, 3) the intercultural action scheme, and 4) the repercussions of this integrated approach on polycentric governance. This book includes diverse examples of the application of this framework in DSES ranging from co-designing socio-ecological development projects, to adaptive management, and policy development.

Developing-country rangelands are vast and diverse. They are home to millions who are often poor, politically marginalized, and dependent on livestock for survival. Here we summarize our experiences from six case-study sites in sub-Saharan Africa, central Asia, and Latin America generally covering the past 25 years. We examine issues pertaining to population, natural resource management, climate, land use, livestock marketing, social conflict, and pastoral livelihoods. The six study sites differ with respect to human and livestock population dynamics and the resulting pressures on natural resources. Environmental degradation, however, has been commonly observed. Climate change is also having diverse systemic effects often related to increasing aridity. As rangelands become more economically developed pastoral livelihoods may diversify, food security can improve, and commercial livestock production expands, but wealth stratification widens. Some significant upgrades in rural infrastructure and public service delivery have occurred; telecommunications are markedly improved overall due to widespread adoption of mobile phones. Pressures from grazing, farming, mining, and other land uses-combined with drought-can ignite local conflicts over resources, although the intensity and scope of conflicts markedly varies across our case-study sites. Pastoralists and their herds have become more sedentary overall due to many factors, and this can undermine traditional risk-management tactics based on mobility. Remote rangelands still offer safe havens for insurgents, warlords, and criminals especially in countries where policing remains weak; the resulting civil strife can undermine commerce and public safety. There has been tremendous growth in knowledge concerning developing-country rangelands since 1990, but this has not often translated into improved environmental stewardship or an enhanced wellbeing for rangeland dwellers. Some examples of demonstrable impact are described, and these typically have involved longer-term investments in capacity building for pastoralists, local professionals, and other stakeholders. Research is shifting from ecologically centered to more human-centered issues; traditional academic approaches are often being augmented with participatory, community-based engagement. Building human or social capital in ways that are integrated with improved natural resource stewardship offers the greatest returns on research investment. Our future research and outreach priorities include work that fortifies pastoral governance, enhances livelihoods for a diverse array of rangeland residents, and improves land and livestock management in a comprehensive social-ecological systems approach.

The Borana pastoral system has long been regarded as a model for sustainable resource use in eastern Africa. Recent growth in human and livestock populations, however, has contributed to a marked decline in rangeland condition, as well as increasing poverty. Another trend is fewer pastoralists controlling more resources. Today, for example, only 10% of households own 60% of all livestock. This wealthy minority has become increasingly important but has received little research attention. We wanted to learn how such elites perceive system change and how they innovate when accumulating or managing their assets. Twelve wealthy men were interviewed. They noted that the pastoral system is in sharp decline, with the most serious livestock-production constraints including chronic shortages of forage and labor. The average value of the physical and financial assets held by these men was estimated as at least USD $164,000, about 62-times that held by poor households. The average investment portfolio was composed of livestock (two-thirds of total value), while savings accounts in local banks and urban real estate (largely housing) made up the remainder. Livestock in general—and cattle in particular—were the riskiest physical assets given recurrent effects of drought and forage scarcity on animal productivity and mortality. When asked to identify future investment priorities, the men said that investing in urban real estate and their children was now preferred to investing in more livestock; their tradition of steady livestock reinvestment has thus changed. Recent urban growth in the rangelands has given the wealthy elite new investment options that offset heightened risks of animal losses. Urban investments are important because they could facilitate town development and provide incentives to improve range management via destocking. Outreach programs focused on the diversification of pastoral assets could include wealthy pastoralists as opinion leaders and accelerate positive change here.

•We used social-science methods to study how social, economic, technical, and institutional factors have influenced medusahead control near Paradise, Utah, over the past 25 years. In general, control efforts have struggled. Each of the four factors can assume some responsibility for this outcome.•Low and uncertain funding for both research and outreach, however, has been the major constraint overall.•Research needs more funding to identify a reliable, cost-effective control program. Outreach then will have a message that landowners are eager to hear. Effective control methods can also promote improved weed law enforcement and the stability of state funding lines in support of weed management.•Weed control, however, is also a shared responsibility. Landowners must be willing to make changes in grazing management that complement the application of new technology. “Silver bullet” technical solutions are unrealistic.•Outreach needs more funding to support weed coordinators who can effectively work with the public. Today'’s weed coordinator needs strong leadership, communication, and analytical skills. Recruiting and retaining such talent requires a commitment to higher levels of compensation than has been the norm.•Despite the high socioeconomic diversity of landowners here, many have shared values on the importance of noxious weed control and the need for community collaboration. We also discovered that only 40 of 1,329 total landowners controlled 80% of all acreage, and 37 of these had never been engaged in formal weed-control efforts. This all represents untapped outreach opportunities, while the latter also illustrates the need for a targeted stakeholder analysis at the beginning of any weed-control project.•Ultimately, research and outreach institutions must tackle funding gaps and build professional capacity to promote improved medusahead control.

The Borana Plateau is a heavily studied pastoral ecosystem. Knowledge generated with respect to the history and politics of the region, pastoral system dynamics, and patterns of environmental change is instructive in understanding how environmental degradation is linked to pastoral development priorities and policies. Despite decades of research and development efforts, the Borana pastoral system is characterized by increasing poverty, wealth stratification, and food insecurity. The condition and trend for rangelands in the north-central portion of the plateau is deemed generally poor due to chronically intense pressure from large numbers of livestock in support of a growing human population. Particularly noteworthy is the emergence of extensive gullying and bush encroachment in several locations; in both cases the productivity of the pastoral system has been reduced. This trend is attributed to decades of development priorities and policies that have failed to provide incentives for surplus pastoralists to discover alternative livelihoods, or for herd owners to adopt resource management tactics that could promote environmental stewardship. The way forward is to dispense with laissez faire attitudes regarding condition and trend of natural resources and forge new collaborative partnerships among pastoral communities, researchers, and development agents to reverse environmental degradation where possible. This requires a transformation of local governance so that stocking rates can be better managed and innovative land-management systems can be adopted to better accommodate the increasing population pressure and more frequent droughts. Over the longer term, assisting those who wish to leave pastoralism can reduce demands on natural resources and promote system sustainability.

J. Anim. Sci Vol. 94, E-Suppl. 5/J. Dairy Sci. Vol. 99, E-Suppl. 1 0839 Pastoral systems in the developing world: Trends, needs, and future scenarios. D. L. Coppock, M. Fernandez-Gimenez, P. Hiernaux, E. Huber-Sannwald, C. Schloeder, C. Valdivia, J. T. Arredondo, M. Jacobs, C. Turin, and M. Turner, Utah State University, Logan, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Geosciences Environment Toulouse, Toulouse, France, Instituto Potosino de Investigacion Cientifica y Tecnologica, San Luis Potosi, Mexico, Oikos Services LLC, Fortine, MT, University of Missouri, Columbia, International Potato Center, Lima, Peru, University of Wisconsin, Madison.