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In communal grazing lands in Sub-Saharan Africa, two immediate problems face pastoralists and other users of communal lands: (1) weak local institutional oversight of common pool resources in grazing lands; and (2) inadequate evidence for the cost-effectiveness of various grazing management and restoration practices, especially in arid and other non-equilibrium rangelands. In this synthesis of local capacity development and restoration work across multiple systems and locations, it is shown that there are significant commonalities in terms of how progress may be achieved, as well as a number of important differences. Specifically, shared commonalities include: capacity building of grazing management institutions improves local oversight; local or 'traditional' knowledge may be generally sufficient for grazing management, though can improve with appropriate integration of global or 'expert' knowledge; local knowledge may be generally insufficient for restoration, but has a strong role to play; implementing new grazing management or restoration practices requires fitting to local systems, plans, and goals; this fitting can be accomplished through pastoralist –expert co-design of grazing and restoration practices; and, as decades of development experience have sho wn, new grazing management or restoration practices that fit local conditions poorly are generally ineffective or unsustainable. Differences among systems and locations include aridity and associated equilibrium (more humid rangelands are less variable) and non-equilibrium (more arid rangelands are more variable) ecosystem behavior ; degree of privatization; livelihood priorities (crops, livestock, or both) and management goals; scale of grazing lands and their institutions, and processes and rate of capacity development; degree of previous degradation and rate of change in range condition; and the technical practices applied. Not only are these commonalities and divergences useful for improving environmental performance including carbon storage, they are essential to supporting local pastoralist institutions to enhance resilient livelihoods.