Including Pastoralism in Community Forests, Tanzania

Project summary

Pastoralist and Agropastoralist (PAP)-farmer conflicts in Tanzania appear to be increasing. These conflicts cause distress and loss of assets and lives, including deaths, disabilities, the killing of livestock in addition to the destruction of crops, loss of property and disturbance of peace in general. The main hypothesis of this project is that village land forest reserves (VLFRs), i.e. forests officially under village governments’ authority hold substantial quantities of fodder and water that can be used by livestock in biophysically sustainable ways that are mutually beneficial to PAP and farming communities and hence offer a pathway to readdress the conflicts. The project aims to uncover and understand the economic and conflict-reducing potentials associated with the inclusion of PAPs in the governance of VLFRs. The Livestock in the Forests (LIVEFOR) project is innovative because the de facto inclusion of PAPs in VLFRs has never been studied systematically in Tanzania. VLFRs offer a unique possibility to study the governance of livestock in forests because, in some VLFRs, they are formally accepted by village governments, which is not the case for any other type of reserved forests from which the authorities often violently evict livestock. Thus, we believe that a study of the processes and implications of current, de facto, inclusion of livestock in VLFRs can generate useful and evidence-based information to develop new imaginations of multi-purpose forest governance that could alleviate livestock-related conflicts more broadly in Tanzania and other countries in Africa as well as Asia.

Outputs

First Annual Report

Recruitment of PhD students: developed a call for application, advertised on 16 February 2020 with March 15th 2020 deadline, 35 applications received, evaluated using formulated shortlisting criteria by reviewers from CoU and SUA. 10 shortlisted and interviewed on 3rd and 4th June 2020. Benezet Rwelengera, Edith Benedict (Female) and Raymond Okick were awarded the LIVEFOR Scholarship, admitted on 30th July 2020 and registered on 10th August 2020 at SUA. Post-doc candidate was admitted on 3rd April 2020 and registered on 14th June 2020. PhD, Post-doc students and Vice-Chancellor at SUA signed a Letter of Sub-Grant Agreements stipulating budgets and responsibilities of SUA (the LIVEFOR project) and the students. Office number 29 fitted with furniture was secured and allocated to the students.
Field scouting: collected data in five regions on history of establishment of VLFRs, socio-economic profiles, demographic data, conflicts, gender and justified selection of the areas for WP1, WP2 and WP3 and students identification of research topics.
Students proposal development: supervised the students, developed proposals and were approved by the College on June 2021.
Research tools and preliminary data collection started in the LIVEFOR cites.
One publication drafted: Farmers, Pastoralisms and Conservation: Conflict analysis and Resolutions.
Established a twit account namely LIVEFOR@LIVEFOR49169954