Creating equitable pathways in South African rangelands: why history and politics matter

As global debates on climate change impacts and how to promote resilient and ecologically sustainable farming and livelihoods in the global South proceed, there is increasing focus on the role of rangelands. Global debates have highlighted how sustainable rangeland management practices can enhance carbon sequestration, improving biodiversity and ecological resilience of ecosystems.

According to some estimates, rangelands cover half of the world’s land area. In South Africa they constitute more than 75% of the land surface used for agriculture, while communal rangelands constitute 25% of the country’s land. Southern African rangelands are multifunctional: they are an important ecological resource that is critical in managing climate adaptation, mitigation and resilience, and they support marginalised livelihoods, especially through extensive livestock farming and natural resource harvesting in communal areas.

However, expert knowledge and policy processes are usually not based on a grounded understanding of local contexts, lived experiences and local practices of communities in Southern African rangelands who are most affected by climate change impacts.

Understanding contexts

‘Nature-based solutions’ (NbS) are being widely applied in different contexts across the globe to support biodiversity, enhance ecological resilience and address climate impacts.

In the REPAiR project, among other things, we are exploring the historical, political, social and ecological dynamics of communal rangelands, and the extent to which NbS can contribute to the restoration, biodiversity and ecological resilience of rangeland commons. Our project will explore how this critical livelihood resource can be leveraged to address climate-related challenges using participatory, locally grounded, context-specific and mutually beneficial solutions.

Although NbS are sometimes seen as a technical or scientific challenge, the context in which they are used is equally important. For our work in Southern Africa, this means understanding how rangelands have been shaped by history, and how this continues to affect the way rangelands are governed today.

Communal rangelands: a contested history

Colonial agricultural development and conservation policies have had far-reaching and long-lasting impacts on land governance, tenure systems and land use practices in South Africa. State interventions, which aimed to ‘rationalize’ rural production and minimize unsustainable land use practices amongst African households in former homelands, shaped (and continue to shape) grazing practices in rangeland commons.

Of particular significance are ‘betterment’ or ‘improvement’ policies. These often entailed the demarcation of rural land into residential, grazing and arable land, supposedly to promote sustainable and economically viable farming practices amongst African households.

Ironically, these improvement schemes often left rural households with less land, leading to overpopulation and then livestock culling to maintain the land’s economic ‘carrying capacity’.

The ‘betterment’ removals and displacement of people undermined indigenous and ecologically sustainable grazing practices: cattle were confined to grazing camps, which were often overstocked and overgrazed, and did not allow for livestock mobility across different patches of rangelands.

The myth of the ‘tragedy of the commons’

Local communities in areas like Matatiele in the Eastern Cape had long relied on indigenous grazing practices, like the maboella system.

Far from being a ‘free for all’ grazing system, the maboella system entailed setting aside certain portions of communal land for grazing at different times of the year. Fallow fields, or fields which had been abandoned for longer periods, would also form part of the grazing land. However, ‘betterment’ policies, informed by ‘tragedy of the commons’-style thinking, undermined these practices.

Scholars have shown that underlying these colonial interventions were misconceptions about communal tenure systems, especially the mistaken view that these tenure systems are ‘open access’ and would result in the so-called ‘tragedy of the commons’.

If anything, it was colonial land dispossessions and the disruption of sustainable grazing practices that contributed significantly to soil erosion and environmental degradation in communal rangelands where betterment policies had been implemented. The impacts of this complex history are still evident in these local communities, and interventions in rural areas today must contend with these legacies.

Disrupting governance

Colonial and apartheid ‘improvement’ policies were often accompanied by the distortion of the traditional authority governance systems.

Customary tenure systems are characterised by overlapping land rights and involve different social structures exercising authority over different parcels of land. Yet colonial systems tended to centralize land administration powers in the hands of traditional leaders – overlooking the rights individual families have over certain parcels of land.

Development interventions – including agriculture, mining, conservation and green energy projects – have often alienated rural land through dealing with traditional leaders and rural elites, without adequate consultation and without obtaining the consent of rural communities. Any present-day ‘solutions’, including NbS, which aim to enhance the resilience of marginalized populations to climate and ecological crises, must be sensitive to these historical realities and the multiple ways in which they continue to shape the present.

Continuities from past to present

It has been widely established that communal governance tenure systems do not inherently promote the wanton and unsustainable use of natural resources as assumed in colonial and apartheid policies. But debates on the ‘viability’ of farming also reveal some of the inherent biases that continue to inform present land reform and agricultural development policies.

In particular, large-scale commercial farming is portrayed as more viable, efficient and worth supporting, whereas smallholder farming in communal areas is portrayed as traditional and inefficient.

These narratives and policy biases continue to inform ‘expert knowledge’ and policy interventions in agriculture and land reform. When it comes to rangeland commons and extensive livestock production systems in rural areas, there is insufficient understanding of the political, social and ecological contexts shaping these agrarian settings and traditional governance systems.

At the same time, land and resources are being captured in various ways. Simplistic notions of ‘community’, which overlook the power dynamics and existing social inequalities and hierarchies of class, gender and generations, have often enabled the capture and privatization of commons by rural elites and other powerful groups.

In the land reform context, where commercial farmland is redistributed to groups of beneficiaries on municipal commonages, elites often ‘privatize’ the grazing commons and exclude large sections of the ‘community’. Meanwhile, in traditional authority areas, commons have often been expropriated for large-scale investments in agriculture, forestry and timber, mining and other extractive activities.

Added to this, there is growing evidence of ‘green grabbing’ where conservation initiatives, green energy projects and other climate-related initiatives can result in land loss and exclusion of local communities. In communities bordering conservation areas, environmental and resource conflicts ensue as local communities struggle for equitable access to and use of natural resources, including fair benefit-sharing arrangements.

Multiple benefits from livestock

Other complexities relate to the failure to understand how extensive livestock production systems function in rangeland commons.

Much of the focus in mainstream agricultural and land reform policy has been on the commercial value of livestock. But commercial value isn’t everything. Often overlooked is the significant role of livestock in supporting livelihoods in marginalized rural populations, and the wide array of non-commercial benefits from livestock.

Households in communal areas rely on multi-purpose herds, unlike commercial livestock production which focuses on single-purpose herds and emphasizes commercial off-take and market value. In communal areas, the wide range of benefits derived from multi-purpose herds include the use of livestock for ceremonial purposes, bride wealth, funerals, provision of draught power, manure and leather.

Narrow policy designs even favour certain types of animals over others. State policies in agriculture and land reform have mainly focused on cattle production, while small livestock, for instance sheep and goats, have not been adequately supported. Yet there is a vibrant informal small livestock economy that has largely remained invisible to policy makers. Recent estimates on the economic value of goat production in KwaZulu-Natal show that this is a very dynamic market with huge employment and other multiplier effects.

Importantly, livestock production in communal areas is highly gendered, with women mainly focusing on small livestock production. Given that the small livestock economy is neglected and priority given to cattle production, traditionally a male-dominated farming activity, there is a missed opportunity to support women in agriculture and foster equitable gender outcomes.

Global debates and local experiences

Despite the complex historical, political, ecological and cultural dynamics that define communal rangelands in Southern Africa, there are significant opportunities for NbS to contribute to more equitable outcomes based on grounded appreciation of local realities. Locally-informed NbS can reduce the disjuncture between the global debates and the local realities of marginalized people.

Debates on the adverse impacts of livestock production on climate have largely been informed by experiences from the global North where industrial livestock farming is predominant. But extensive livestock production, if appropriately practised, can be ecologically sustainable.

Some proposed alternatives to conventional livestock farming systems involve the production of lab-grown meat derived from livestock stem cells and related alternative protein technologies. Although it is still in nascent research and development phases, the idea of lab-grown meat, as an alternative to existing livestock farming systems, raises concerns about corporate capture and adverse impacts on food systems and livelihoods, especially in the Global South.

History and politics matter

Southern African rangelands are key to any climate solutions given their importance as carbon sinks, in biodiversity restoration and management, and enhancing ecological resilience of ecosystems. Nature-based solutions should nurture positive interconnections between people, nature and climate and promote equitable and transformative pathways of change which place marginalized populations at the centre.

NbS need to be applied in a careful manner, sensitive to historical and contextual dynamics, paying careful attention to indigenous knowledge systems and practices, political economy dynamics, especially power asymmetries and social hierarchies of gender and between generations which mediate outcomes in NbS.

Sensitivity to context and local realities also means that scaling-up NbS should not be viewed as a universal process, but should be sensitive to contextual differences. Finally, carefully thinking about inequalities, possible winners and losers, will partly address global concerns around ‘green grabbing’, environmental and resource conflicts – as adverse outcomes that may undermine the efficacy of NbS and climate change policies.

Farai Mtero is a Senior Researcher at the Institute of Poverty, Land and Agrarian Studies (PLAAS). View Farai Mtero’s profile on the PLAAS website