Pastoralist women's perceptions of tenure security and implications for collective tenure regimes, policies and practices

Abstract

Land tenure security and perceptions of that security are core characteristics of people's resilience and capacity to adapt to climate change. However there has been limited consideration of perceptions of tenure security in collective tenure systems including in global frameworks for measuring perceptions of tenure security. This paper examines how pastoralist tenure security and particularly, women's tenure security is considered and accommodated for in such collective tenure systems, and the implications for communal land governance and frameworks that attempt to capture the tenure security of these. Focusing on three purposively selected, well-governed pastoralist communities—the Wakilé Allah (Burkina Faso), the Bagagir (Sudan) and the Waldaa Boran (Kenya)—the study focuses on perceptions of both group-level and individual access rights to grazing lands, mobility and related resources, emphasizing the role of customary governance in shaping women's tenure outcomes. Mixed and sex-segregated FGDs conducted between 2022 and 2023 elicited local property practices, threats and opportunities, and probabilistic judgments about losing access over one, five, ten years and across a lifetime. Findings show that collective tenure can provide meaningful tenure security for women when customary governance is strong, inclusive and enforceable. Among the Bagagir in Sudan and the Waldaa in Kenya, respondents (men and women) generally reported strong perceptions of group and individual security, pointing to group cohesion, reciprocity and institutionalized leadership—including, in the Kenyan case, substantive women's representation—as protective factors. By contrast, the Wakilé Allah in Burkina Faso and particularly women expressed higher short-term insecurity driven by agricultural encroachment and other land pressures, weaker host-community relations and more tenuous governance. Social cohesion plays a crucial role in shaping perceptions of security and well-functioning governance systems. These results make an important contribution to the further development of global land indicators and frameworks measuring perceptions of tenure security and their inclusion of collective tenure. The paper also highlights that pastoralist women like men perceive their tenure security acquired through the collective to be strong, highlighting the opportunity of strengthening women's tenure through the collective rather than assuming individual titling alternatives.