ABSTRACT
This study focuses on conflicts over livestock and rangeland resources in post-apartheid South Africa, and suggests that the roots of these struggles lie not only in the skewed distribution of land, but also in the important role of livestock in complex rural livelihood systems and in processes of social differentiation. Perspectives from the wider literature on livestock and rangelands in Africa and on common property regimes are brought to bear on the specifics of the South African case, and several axes 304of struggle over common property are identified. Complex interactions between the economic, ecological and political and institutional dimensions are explored in two case studies from the Eastern Cape and Kwazulu-Natal. These provide general lessons for the political economy of common property resources within South Africa's agrarian reform.
