Short Abstract

This panel rethinks the “failure” of late-colonial and early-independence pastoral development schemes in Africa, asking how abandoned projects nevertheless left durable boundaries, institutions, forms of expertise, and archives that continue to shape rangeland governance today.

Long Abstract

Across late-colonial and early-independence Africa, states and experts introduced a wave of pastoral “improvement” schemes: grazing blocks, destocking and dip-and-borehole regimes in British East Africa; betterment planning and the Native Land Husbandry Act in Southern Africa; zones pastorales and ranching perimeters in the francophone Sahel; and range programmes in Ethiopia and Somalia. Despite their different settings, they shared a technocratic belief in sedentarisation, bounded rangelands, and the regulation of pastoral land use. Most were eventually declared failures, and historians have largely accepted the verdict: targets went unmet, boundaries were abandoned, loans remained unrecovered, and pastoralists kept to the practices the schemes had sought to replace.

This panel treats failure not as a verdict but as a starting point. First, it asks what failure meant: against whose objectives, on whose timescale, and judged by whom? A scheme that never sedentarised herders might still have produced lasting boundaries, administrative categories, expert authority and new ways of making pastoral societies legible to the state. Second, it asks what happened after schemes formally ended. Their boundaries, ideas and institutional heirs can be traced through group ranches and conservancies, land titling, and newer carbon and biodiversity-credit projects. The schemes also produced archives: surveys, maps, reports and range data that could be taken up and put to new uses decades later.

The panel examines how failed schemes continue to shape Africa’s rangelands, and how their archives and institutional legacies have become usable pasts for new forms of governance.

Keywords: pastoralism, rangelands, development, colonialism, archives, land tenure

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