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Throughout eastern Africa the economic base of tribal societies has gone through rapid change, with 
concomitant declines in common pool resources and emergence of new tenure systems (public and private, informal 
and state regulated).  The rapid pace of cultural, political-economic and environmental change have put significant 
strains on traditional management systems and coping strategies – mechanisms that once provided for basic needs of 
residents while to a large degree maintaining ecosystem function.  Compounding the challenge is a rapid erosion of 
self-reliance among local communities with the influx of external knowledge and economic systems, and of modern 
institutional reforms (administrative, religious, educational).   
These historical dynamics have created a number of problems for rangeland resource management, 
including decreased productivity, degradation of water resources, and increased conflict and competition.  However, 
addressing rangeland resource issues requires a holistic understanding of livelihood systems, including trade-offs 
and interactions between communal rangelands on the one hand, and private property and cropland on the other.  
Communal rangelands in eastern Africa are interspersed with individual cropland both spatially and temporally, 
creating strong functional linkages that define both the problems affecting rangelands and the potential solutions.   
Viewing rangeland resource problems in relation to other resources demonstrates the need for integrative solutions, 
including an explicit recognition of the linkages between common and private property, user groups (in terms of 
social trade-offs) and disciplines (technological, social, policy).   
This paper presents data from two benchmark sites of the African Highlands Initiative (AHI)
1
in the 
highlands of central Ethiopia and northeast Tanzania, respectively.  Results of individual interviews and 
ethnohistorical research with elders, conducted as part of a preliminary watershed exploration exercise in these sites, 
are presented.  They paint a picture of current land use systems, how these systems evolved over time and key 
“forcing functions” behind these changes.  Both watershed-level diagnostic activities and historical trends analyses 
point to disturbing trends in natural resource degradation over time, how such trends have impacted upon rangeland 
resources and livlihoods, and the nature of intervntions required to ameliorate both trends and outcomes. (source: Abstract)