Causes and Management of Land Conflicts in Tanzania: A Case of Farmers versus Pastoralists

Abstract

Land conflicts are on the increase in many parts of Tanzania. Though the same existed even in the planned economy era 1961 to 1985,  there has been an escalation of the same since Tanzania opted for the free market economy in the mid-1980s. While land conflicts are  experienced by all walks of life and people engaged in different economic activities, those between farmers and pastoralists have been  more dreadful leading to loss of life and property in many instances. The aim of this paper is twofold: firstly, to examine the factors that  have contributed to the causes and persistence of farmer-pastoralist conflicts in Tanzania; and secondly, to examine the strategies that  have been applied in managing farmer-pastoralist conflicts. The paper contains a review that is organised into three fundamental  sections. After introduction, Section Two discusses the literature that analyses the conflict by drawing on the social, historical and  economic causes. In Section Three, the paper introduces some of the key frameworks used within the peace and conflict literature,  particularly in reference to the differing notions of conflict management, conflict resolution and conflict transformation that could be  applied in solving or managing conflicts between farmers and pastoralists in Tanzania for the good of both groups. The paper makes two  conclusions: firstly, the farmer-pastoralist conflict tends to be best explained through an interpretive lens that sees many processes  impacting on the highlighted issue. While farmer-pastoralist conflicts have been produced by social, historical, economic and discursive  factors; the former three factors have dominated most of the analysis within the literature. Secondly, there is no single solution for  managing the conflicts. However, to effectively manage the conflicts communities need to adopt a multidimensional approach that takes  into account a range of the contributing factors.