Most mountain pastures in Italy are underutilized or even abandoned due to urbanization, low in - comes, limited social opportunities for rural families. A three years research was done on the rehabilitation of some pastures in two farms of North-Western Tuscany, central Italy.

In semi-arid areas of the Mediterranean basin, sheep and goat herding has been a land management activity for millennia. In the last decades, intensification of grazing has resulted in grazing land degradation.

The paper aims to present changes and current dynamics of mountainous pastoral systems in Southern Albania (Korca region) and to identify origin-based quality products as a strategy for sustainable rural development.

The management and rehabilitation of degraded rangelands are inherently complex in south Mediterranean where state and tribal owned pastures are grazed commonly by the agro-pastoralists. The prospect for increased degradation primarily caused by overgrazing and recurrent droughts is currently at alarming levels.

Mediterranean landscapes have been formed through human activity for millennia, which resulted in a particularly rich and rare biodiversity. Among these activities grazing is the most beneficial on biodiversity. However, the sheep and goat sector is rapidly transforming into sedentary-housed types and pastoral land is abandoned.

Sustainable participatory watershed management is an approach promoted by the Ethiopian government to restore natural resources and agricultural productivity across the country. This comparative study between six watershed programs shows that this approach increases farmers’ food security and incomes (around 50% on average), as well as their resilience to drought and other climate shocks.

Achieving cooperation in natural resource management is always
a challenge when incentives exist for an individual to maximise her short term
benefits at the cost of a group. We study a public good social dilemma in water
infrastructure provision on land reform farms in Namibia. In the context of the

It took scientists more than three decades to transform a perceived desertification crisis in the Sahel into a non-event. Looking beyond the Sahel, the chapters in this book provide case studies from around the world that examine the use and relevance of the desertification concept.

The Government of Ethiopia and more specifically, the Rural Land Administration and Use Directorate, (RLAUD) has identified land use planning as an important tool for the sustainable development of the country. Land use planning is vital for optimising the use of the land and for reconciling conflicts between different land uses.

Resilience-building planning in drylands requires a participatory, integrated approach that incorporates issues of scale (often large scale) and the interconnectedness of dryland ecological and social systems.