In tandem with state laws, pastoralists in Tanzania hold land traditionally through a collective form of ownership that transcends the country’s administrative units such as villages, wards, districts, or regions. However, institutional hurdles abound impeding the protection of collectively owned lands by pastoralists and consequently curtailing free movement of livestock across the traditional rangelands. The institutions include wildlife management related authorities created by overlapping legislative frameworks, the village – a semi-autonomous entity on land administration in rural areas – and the court of law which consistently applies restrictive interpretive frames to individualise remediation of collective land dispossession. This article posits that supportive institutions are key to protecting collective land rights and enabling communal sharing of rangeland resources that are increasingly getting scarcer due to climate change and its impacts such as prolonged droughts. It recommends breaking free from institutions built on colonial legal concepts and restrictive statutory interpretive methodologies. Instead, policy makers and courts are enjoined to re-imagine the centrality of institutions that are supportive of collective land holding, which is more aligned to a sense of justice and more compatible to livelihoods of pastoralists. This article was published open access under a CC BY-NC 4.0 licence: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ .
Elifuraha Laltaika (Sat,) studied this question.