TheImprovement ofTropical and Subtropical Rangelands

THE SOOIAL OONTEXT FOR RANGELAND IMPROVEMENT 43
regions is rare, except in those places where irrigation or other conditions
made permanent cultivation possible. Land ownership in these
areas was, and still is to a large extent, collective. In areas of shifting
cultivation, the cultivator had use rights to a piece of land as long as
it was cultivated, but did not have an inalienable right to that land.
Such rights belonged to a large group-a village, commune, clan, or
tribe.
Rights to grazing lands and forest lands are also collective. However
l
in this case there are no user rights to individual pieces of land.
Although an individual might habitually use a pasture or forest, mobility
is essential to responding to fluctuations in precipitation and
plant production, making exclusive assignments of land impractical.
Often the boundaries between the territories of different pastoral
groups are imprecisely defined, and relations of kinship and reciprocity
exist that permit groups to temporarily use the pastures and
forests of others. Collective ownership of pasture and forestlands is
also more economical than individual tenure. The low and variable
annual productivity of theee lands makes the cost of maintaining
fences and access roads to individual plots prohibitive. Under these
conditions, if mobility is not impeded by private ownership of lands,
all users of collective lands benefit &om higher levels of production.
AJJ the discuaion above indicates, collective ownership of land
facilitated both mobility and diversification. Therefore, a large proportion
of range and forest lands remains today under the control
of localities or as part of the public domain in Europe, Japan, and
North America.
To say that lands are collectively awned does not imply completely
open and unregulated access. That would lead to a "tragedy
of the commons" situation such as that described by Hardin (1968),
where individuals would each increase their herds or their use of the
foreets until the productive capacity of the resource was destroyed.
Such unregulated exploitation of the environment ignores the fact
that members of subsistence groups depend upon each other for
their survival and are not individuals single-mindedly pursuing personal
gain at all costs (Runge, 1981). Also, it is illogical to suggest
that any group would stand by and let their subsistence base be
destroyed.
The "tragedy" historically appears to occur where competition
over land and its resources increases, and where differential access