Governance & local environmental management in Africa

Current policy prescriptions for environmental management in Africa emphasise devolution of resource management to local non‐government and community organisations. They challenge the long‐standing orthodoxy of environmental conservation based on land privatisation, and instead favour local institutions managing resources as common property. This challenge has been reinforced by arguements from a reappraisal of dryland ecology in Africa, and by empirical and economic theoretical research on common property management. Implicit within much of current policy is the assumption that devolution of natural resource management will be socially redistributive as well as environmentally benign. Evidence from Maasai group ranches in southern Kenya suggests this assumption may be misplaced, and that, to address equality goals, policy must take more explicit account of the social dynamics underlying local power relations, and the way these are conditioned by the non‐local political environment.