This book provides a timely and policy-relevant examination of the governance of pastoralism in Africa, positioning pastoral systems within wider debates on natural resource governance, conflict, sustainability, and rural development. It argues that fragmented, exclusionary, and weakly implemented legal and institutional frameworks have significantly contributed to recurring tensions between farmers and pastoralists, particularly over agricultural land and water.

Conflict in pastoral communities has led to thousands of deaths, massive property destruction, displacement, and worsening food and human insecurity. Moving beyond reductive narratives that frame these tensions solely as resource scarcity, the book interrogates the structural governance failures that produce and sustain these crises. Drawing on extensive original socio-legal research in Nigeria, while engaging comparatively with developments across West, East, North and Southern Africa, the book analyzes constitutional arrangements, land tenure regimes, environmental regulation, the interplay between statutory and customary institutions, and the role of state and non-state actors. The book advances evidence-based and context-sensitive governance pathways aimed at strengthening coordination, securing resource rights, reducing conflict, and promoting sustainable livelihoods.

This book will be of significant value to policymakers, development practitioners, and scholars working in natural resource governance, environmental law, land tenure, conflict and security studies, and African socio-legal scholarship.

Jane Ezirigwe is a socio-legal researcher affiliated with the University of Ottawa and the Nigerian Institute of Advanced Legal Studies. She earned her PhD from the University of Cape Town. With two decades of experience spanning legal practice, research, advocacy, teaching, and knowledge mobilization across five continents, her work focuses on human-technology-environment partnerships in the food and agricultural sector, particularly natural resource and big data governance. She applies socio-legal methodologies and is committed to advancing gender equity and social justice through evidence-based research.