ABSTRACT
The societies of dryland West Africa have witnessed considerable turmoil over the ownership of, access to, and the rights to exploit land and other natural resources. This chapter looks at the particular challenges faced by one dryland country, Burkina Faso, where considerable efforts have been made to improve the governance of rural land and natural resources in recent years. Burkina Faso provides an interesting example of how natural resource management and the reorganization of political governance can become linked. By means of three case studies, I argue that Burkinabés have remained agile and ‘adaptive’ – seeking out their own solutions to land pressures and livelihood security, even as several governance experiments and political decentralization have slowly been put in place.
