Including Pastoralism in Community Forests, Tanzania
Info
Start date: 1 March, 2020 End date: 28 February, 2025 Project type: Research projects in countries with extended development cooperation (earlier Window 1) Project code: 19-12-TAN Countries: Tanzania Thematic areas: Conflict, peace and security, State building, governance and civil society, Lead institution: Sokoine University of Agriculture (SUA), Tanzania Partner institutions: Mwalimu Nyerere Memorial Academy (MNMA), Tanzania University of Copenhagen (UCPH), Denmark Project website: go to website (the site might be inactive) Project coordinator: Jumanne Abdallah Total grant: 11,998,945 DKKProject 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
Midterm report
WP1: The political ecology of PAP and forestry in Tanzania
PhD Student: Benezet Rwelengera: 2Publications drafted
(i) Pastoral-Normativity and Identities in the Media: A Decolonial Reading of
Newspapers’ Portrayal of Pastoralism in Tanzania
(ii) Are grazed forests less productive, diverse, and useful? A systematic review
WP2:The de facto governance of VLFRs which include PAPs
•PhD Student: Edith Benedict
•1 Publication drafted
(i) An Institutional Gray Area? Herding under Decentralised Natural Resources
Governance Logics in Tanzania’s Maasailand
•Household Survey (HHS) in 10 villages completed
WP3: Implications of PAP integration on VLFRs’ ecology and production economics
•PhD student: Raymond Okick
•1 publication drafted
(i) Livestock grazing intensity, plant species diversity and structure in
community forest reserve in Kiteto District, Tanzania – Data analysis
started
•HHS in 10 villages completed
•Biomass and soil samples collected
•Biomass and soil laboratory analysis for nutrition determination started
Postdoc student: Parit Saruni
• 1 paper drafted and 1 submitted:
(i) Resource Use Conflicts and Resolution in the Establishment of Emboley Murtangos VLFR in Kiteto District, Tanzania. This paper is submitted to Environment, Development and Sustainability. The submission id is: ENVI-D-23-03341
(ii) Pastoralist Translocation and Interactions with Farmers in VLFR in Katavi and Kigoma, Tanzania