Report: Policies that Work for Pastoral Environments - a Six-Country Review of Positive Policy Impacts on Pastoral Environments

This report outlines lessons learned from six country studies that looked at the positive environmental impacts of supporting mobile pastoralism through government policy. Over the past ten years, research has begun to demonstrate the economic strengths of pastoralism, and the environmental logic of pastoral production, and has begun to dispel some of the fears that pastoralism might be unsustainable, unviable, or irrational. Strong arguments have been put forward for mobile livestock keeping as both a necessary adaptation that enables people to construct livelihoods in many climatically challenging environments, and as an integral component of many rangeland ecosystems, to the extent that its removal leads to loss of ecosystem health and resilience. Given this importance to drylands environments and economies, it is important to understand how policies can support sustainable pastoralist development and promote the environmental services of pastoralism.