PI: Dr Lindsay Walker

Funders: GCRF QR Funding

The world is currently facing many global challenges. A major threat worldwide is the degradation of natural resources, which is interlinked with several other issues including biodiversity loss, climate change, food insecurity and social and economic inequality. One example that highlights the scale and interconnectedness of these challenges is the rangeland ecosystem.   

Rangelands are arid or semi-arid lands that depend on sustainable grazing by wild animals and/or domesticated livestock to maintain soil carbon, water regulation, biodiversity conservation, soil fertility and fire management. Pastoralists are people who raise domesticated livestock on rangelands,  while living in harmony with wildlife. Indigenous ecological knowledge and cultural practices have enabled pastoralists to create livelihoods in such dry and highly variable natural ecosystems. Sustainable pastoral systems therefore play a key role in both generating revenue from arid areas and safeguarding natural capital. 

 However, recent social, economic and ecological changes are undermining the pastoralist way of life and thus the sustainability of the system by constraining access to, and reducing quality of, suitable pasture. Additionally, climate change is exacerbating these issues. Combined, this threatens pastoralist livelihoods and also negatively impacts the ecosystems that wildlife depends on.  

 In recent years, the Northern Rangeland Trust (a land management, conservation and development NGO) has supported groups of pastoralists in northern and coastal Kenya to establish community conservancies. Conservancies aim to manage rangeland areas more effectively by enabling communities to develop more sustainable livestock practices and restore the quality of rangelands. As these measures also improve conditions for wildlife, conservancies play an important role in biodiversity conservation, which can foster income generated through wildlife-related tourism. 

 The issue at the heart of effectively managing the sustainable use of the rangelands is understanding how groups come together to cooperate effectively and use the natural resource in a sustainable manner. Our project brings together researchers at the University of Exeter (Dr Lindsay Walker, Dr Anna Rabinovich, Dr Thomas Currie) with the Northern Rangelands Trust and Converge (an impact and monitoring specialist) to explore socio-psychological predictors of cooperative behaviour relating to sustainable land management in community conservancies in northern Kenya. We aim to provide conservation and development practitioners with evidence-informed practical implications for promoting sustainable land management.