ABSTRACT
The "tragedy of the commons" paradigm found its way into African land tenure policy in remarkably explicit ways. Assignment of leasehold rights to individuals or small groups is the more common approach to tenure reform. Tenure is treated in the model essentially as a dependent policy variable. Tenure rules and institutions normally should be scaled to the circumstances of livestock production, as indicated by the role of livestock in the household economy, and the production orientations and management styles of the producing units. The large-scale commercial operations described in the first row of the model may often warrant granting of exclusive leasehold rights to qualified producers, although implementation of such a radical tenure reform should be approached with great caution as competing rights must be thoroughly adjudicated. In most pastoral production areas of Subsaharan African, communal tenure makes economic and ecological sense.
