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Building effective equitable partnerships and implementing co-designed projects and/or interventions to sustain multi-use rangelands, takes time, sustained commitment, and resources. There are pitfalls. Teams in three African countries used the collaboratively developed Adaptive Systemic Approach (ASA) to navigate these processes. We present a summary of the ASA and findings from its application. Key ASA strengths included: partnership building; enabling co-design; and capacity building through transformative social learning (explicitly respecting and integrating different knowledge forms: academic, practice-based, indigenous). We identify pitfalls: inadequate capacity building across academic disciplines, patchy facilitation skills, process discontinuities (e.g. changing representative participants), inattention to language and translation, power imbalances, and experiences of disrespect. We present adaptations to mitigate pitfalls. In all three contexts we aimed to move towards increased capacity for participatory governance, and an increased likelihood of improved rangeland condition and sustainable livelihoods. 1) The Great Ruaha River catchment (Tanzania), exemplifies challenges related to unequal water resources sharing, and ongoing contestation among competing water users, including communal livestock farmers, crop farmers and other community members. ASA engagements included these marginalised groups, addressed longstanding power imbalances, and set the groundwork for future collaborations. 2) Curren t vegetation cover in the Upper Blue Nile River basin (Ethiopia) reflects a complex interplay of human activities including grazing, cultivation, and selective fodder cutting; interwoven with the influences of climate, soil, and geology. A long-term restoration initiative in the Aba Gerima and Debre Yaqob catchments focusses on managing vegetation cover and the balance of woody plants and grasses. Using the ASA, communities in the two catchments co-developed strategies for rangeland and livelihood sustainability. 3) In the Tsitsa River catchment (South Africa) the appointment of eco-rangers, and early steps towards agreements for rotational grazing of multi-owned herds, in the degraded free-range communal rangeland, emerged from participatory ASA processes.