Un nouveau regard sur la gestion des parcours en Afrique

The series of seminar held since 1990 in Matopos, Zimbabwe, and Woburn, England, about managing African rangeland provide a new way of looking at zones where sources of water and pastures are scattered and irregular. Questioning the conventional view of ranges, the Woburn seminar emphasized the originality and flexibility of pastoral systems, which constantly function in an unstable equilibrium in relation to available resources. Policies for pastoral development should be based on this flexibility, especially for managing land, mobility and years of dearth.