As elsewhere in the world, agencies of local and central government in New Zealand have renewed pressure on high-country pastoral farmers to ensure that their land use is sustainable. However, government policy innovations for conservation have often cut across the path along which farmers were innovating toward sustainable development (Figure 1). Sustained consultation in some parts of the world has revealed that highland people were not short of practical wisdom or ideals of conservation and sustainability. Such deep sharing of understanding and values affected an earlier New Zealand high-country crisis over soil erosion, but it is not yet evident in a current crisis over new policy for conservation of indigenous biodiversity and recreational access. As a result, progress toward sustainable development is retarded, with polarized public debate between stereotypes of public conservation and private economic development. New Zealand needs to find new ways out of this impasse.

The Maloti–Drakensberg bioregion is the highest part of the southern African grassland biome shared by the Kingdom of Lesotho and South Africa. This bioregion is dominated by the Maloti–Drakensberg mountain range, which forms the eastern boundary between Lesotho and 3 of South Africa's provinces, namely, the Orange Free State, Kwa-Zulu/Natal, and the Eastern Cape. The combination of topographical, geological, altitudinal, and climatic variations has resulted in a dramatic landscape characterized by extraordinary natural beauty and rich biodiversity. Although the alpine and subalpine grassland vegetation types in the region are relatively well conserved in relation to other grassland types in the biome, they have been severely affected by a combination of injudicious range management regimes, the spread of alien plants, the establishment of agricultural monocultures, poor infrastructure development and maintenance, and the political engineering of human demographics. Because these grasslands form the most important component of the bioregion's ecosystems and related services such as maintenance of water catchment integrity, it is critical to derive innovative strategies that ensure sustainable solutions to the problems affecting them. The Maloti–Drakensberg Transfrontier Conservation and Development Program seeks to find natural resource and conservation management solutions by integrating biodiversity conservation and socioeconomic growth strategies.

For many centuries, (semi-)nomadic pastoralists used pasture areas in the Tien Shan and Pamir mountains. Under Soviet rule, sedentarization began in the 1930s and collective farms replaced socioeconomic units based on kinship. Soviet land use was monofunctional and dependent on high levels of inputs such as chemical fertilizers, machinery, concentrated feed, and subsidies and was neither ecologically sustainable nor economically viable. In the process of political and economic transformation after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, state farms have been dismantled, land and livestock privatized, and specialized employees such as technicians have suddenly become independent farmers. Today, large farms and herds no longer exist, having been replaced by a multitude of small household enterprises. Each household's socioeconomic situation is unique, and so are household livelihood strategies. Activities focusing on sustainable development and sustainable pasture management must therefore take account of this new socioeconomic situation.

Grassland degradation has become a serious environmental problem in semiarid areas, where it is responsible for land degradation and declines in livestock production. China has about 4,000,000 km² of grassland (cao di, ie, any land that is not classified as “forest,” “cultivated land,” or “no vegetation”), accounting for 40% of its total area, mainly in the middle and western parts of the country, where the economy is relatively underdeveloped. One third of the grassland in China is degraded, and degradation continues at the dramatic rate of 6700 km² per year. This has hindered animal husbandry development and social development in pastoral areas. Grassland rehabilitation has now become an urgent task of local economic development in western China. The Jinsha River valley (Yunnan Province), a main source of sediment for the Yangtze River, is characteristic of fragile ecosystems in western China. In this area, the primary development problems involve conflicts between ecological rehabilitation (especially restoration of grassland) and grazing. Serious degradation of soil and vegetation on account of the fragility is the result of both natural fluctuation and human intervention. To maintain social and economic sustainability, countermeasures are needed as quickly as possible.

Grasslands and forests are degraded in Turkey's Mediterranean Region (TMR), the center of the widespread traditional Yoruk silvopastoral system. Government efforts to halt degradation focus on afforestation, a policy that reduces the amount of land available to the Yoruks for their traditional livelihood system, which is further endangered by socioeconomic dynamics subject to the pressures of globalization. This silvopastoral system is examined with respect to policies that affect it and its potential for sustainability, with a view to regional community development. Interaction between this regional system, a component of traditional culture in the TMR, and current trends in globalization are noted, and the need for harmony between silvopastoralism and forestry is examined.

Grassland degradation in China is widely perceived to be accelerating, and the blame is often placed by government officials and researchers on a supposed “tragedy of the commons.” Grassland policy seeks to address this through the establishment of household tenure and the derivation and external enforcement of household stocking rates. Drawing upon the authors' field research at a number of sites in western China, this article argues that the actual tenure situation is not as open access as is commonly implied and that existing forms of community-based management (including collective and small group tenure) are advantageous, given the socioeconomic and ecological context. Among other things, community-based management can facilitate low-cost external exclusion, economies of size in herd supervision, equal access to pastoral resources, the mitigation of environmental risk, and the prompt resolution of grassland-related disputes. Recent innovative attempts to both improve and formalize collective and group tenure arrangements indicate that there is a wide range of different possible grassland tenure-management models available, in addition to the household tenure–household management model emphasized in grassland policy. China's revised Grassland Law (2003) arguably provides legal space for these alternative models. However, for the future of community-based grassland management to be secure, implementing agencies need to be more aware of these alternative models and have the willingness and capacity to adopt a flexible and participatory approach to grassland policy implementation.

The state of the physical environment is reviewed and the importance of grazing in complex rural livelihoods is assessed in the hitherto little studied Tarija altiplano, Bolivia. Past and contemporary climatic fluctuations have dominated environmental change and are reflected in landforms, soils, vegetation, and land use. Broad fluctuations of dry and wet phases, 200–500 years long, occurred between BC 1500 and the 19th century. Warming has taken place during the 20th century, the final decades characterized by sharp climatic fluctuations (drought and floods) typical of the El Niño southern oscillation. Grazing by sheep and cattle—introduced by Europeans 500 years ago—has affected vegetation, but current grazing pressure alone does not explain the differences in biomass. In most of the areas grazed, present-day herds appear not to affect the quality of the vegetation any more than during the past 500 years. The term overgrazing is misleading, given the complexity of vegetation changes. Transhumance, shareherding, rotations, and the use of microenvironments (bofedales and marshland) ensure optimum recovery of pastures. Given access to other pastures at times of climatic stress, as well as seasonal migration, existing resource use appears ecologically sustainable. It is uncertain whether the security offered by pastoralism will meet the rising livelihood expectations of the young.

Since the colonial era, environmental degradation in Fouta Djalon has been systematically described and denounced as a direct consequence of agropastoral practices. An extremely pessimistic scenario involving extensive farming practices, population increase, environmental degradation, and emigration has gradually emerged, without solid grounding in reality. Although regularly forecasted, the catastrophe is still to come. Elaboration of this crisis scenario is based on received ideas. These ideas have warped the initial diagnosis, led to an erroneous perception of local economic and social dynamics and of their potential for evolution, and ultimately account for the sometimes fantastic character of representations and predicted evolution of environmental dynamics. This misperception of reality is one cause of the low global efficacy of rural development programs.

Biomass productivity, botanical composition, and soil physical properties were studied under conditions with and without application of manure. The study was conducted at the Debre Zeit station of the International Livestock Research Institute, located 5 km from Addis Ababa in the Ethiopian highlands. The aim of the study was to assess the effect of manure on botanical composition, plant biomass, and water infiltration rates. There were 3 treatments: no grazing, moderate grazing (MDG = 1.8 animal unit months [AUM]/hectare), and heavy grazing (HVG = 4.2 AUM/hectare), each replicated 4 times. Removing cow dung from grazed plots decreased biomass production. Species richness was higher on manured plots than on nonmanured plots. The water infiltration rate was low on grazed and nongrazed plots with no manure when compared with the manured plots.

In the Italian Alps dairy cattle are taken to mountain ranges during the summer, which can lead to overlap of areas used by cattle with areas traditionally used by wild ungulates. The aim of the present study was to evaluate the effect of dairy cattle husbandry on the utilization by red deer (Cervus elaphus) of a summer range at an altitude of 1500–1700 m in the Central Italian Alps. Spatial overlap between the 2 species occurred, suggesting that the presence of cattle themselves has a limited impact on red deer. The area where milking took place was among the areas most preferred by deer, probably because of the remains of supplementary feed delivered to cattle during milking operations as well as the presence of high concentrations of cattle urine (salt concentration). Milking operations in the field had the highest impact on red deer in our study, as shown by the dramatic reduction of deer in the area (index of presence: IP = 0.03 ± 0.02 during milking versus 0.35 ± 0.07 without milking; P < 0.001) and by the complete absence of spatial overlap during milking. This indicates that human activities related to dairy cattle husbandry had a higher impact on red deer than did the presence of cattle themselves. Deer seemed to adapt to the rhythm of milking operations, which were carried out routinely every day at fixed times, thus representing a predictable disturbance.

The consequences of tourist growth on extensive livestock farming were studied in a valley in the Spanish Central Pyrenees (Upper Esera), characterized by important growth in tourist activity during the last 3 decades. The municipalities with the greatest tourist development experienced the biggest drop in livestock farming (abandonment of cultivated land, decrease in livestock population and farms) because of the competition of tourism for labor and fertile land, which are essential to the maintenance of extensive livestock farming. Low use of pasture resources leads to their progressive loss, owing to the advance of plant succession (substitution of pastures by shrubs), decreasing landscape diversity, and increased fire hazard and soil erosion. We conclude that the current model of tourist development in the Spanish Pyrenees represents serious problems in terms of sustainable development.

As a follow-up to the International Year of Ecotourism (IYE 2002) and the International Year of Mountains (IYM 2002), scholars and practitioners need to continue to address the challenges inherent in building pilgrim tourism on principles of sustainable tourism that reconcile cultural, developmental, conservational, and commercial interests. This article begins by reasoning that the increasing use of mechanical transport to pilgrim sites in the Central Himalayas erodes the cultural notions that have underpinned the Himalayan pilgrimage for centuries. Then, it seeks to demonstrate in two respects the relevance of insights into how sacred journeying interconnects persons, places, and time. The first insight concerns the travel patterns of and income potential from pleasure and pilgrim tourists in Nepal in the current situation of unstable national and international security. The second insight relates to local perceptions of sociocultural, economic, and environmental risks involved in the opening of cable car service to a famed pilgrimage site in Nepal. Finally, the article reasons that the cultural dimension must be included as a crosscutting concern in environmental, social, and economic impact assessments of transport projects to heritage sites. The study uses a combination of qualitative ethnographic methods, traffic and sociodemographic surveys, as well as official tourism statistics.

Khat (Catha edulis) is a rapidly expanding perennial crop in the Ethiopian highlands, and it is Ethiopia's second largest export item. The leaves of the crop are used for their stimulating effect. The present study was undertaken in Habro district in western Hararghie. Khat production in this district is rapidly replacing cereal production and to some extent coffee production. About 70% of farmers' income in the study area is currently obtained from khat. One important reason for the expansion of khat production is that the khat–maize intercropping system is 2.7 times more profitable per hectare than maize monocropping. Khat is also less risky to grow than cereals and coffee because it is less vulnerable to drought. Increased production leads to changes in livestock composition because oxen are far less needed for plowing in the khat-based system; moreover, availability of crop residues for fodder is reduced when khat expands. Khat growing farmers, therefore, give more emphasis to milk-producing animals such as cows and goats. It was found that khat producers also are consumers of khat and that khat consumption has become widespread in the nearby secondary school. Khat consumption negatively affects people's working capacity. Hence, unskilled khat consumers in urban areas are paid 7 birr (US$0.84) per day, whereas nonkhat users are paid 10 birr (US$1.22). Measures to control further khat expansion will need to address both supply and demand.