Over the last two decades, Mexican rangelands in the Northern dryland region have suffered unprecedented long periods of drought interrupted by strong ENSO years with unusually high precipitation. Also, land use change in these rangelands has been highly dynamic, concomitantly coupling and decoupling ecology, culture, economics, and politics between pastoralists and land. Mexican rangelands have a long history of complex land tenure/ownership, currently divided into private ranches and communal land, so-called ejidos; ejido members have the right to use the land. Through globalization, Mexican rangelands produce almost exclusively livestock at the expense of food crops, native grass species, ecosystem services and resilient multifunctional landscapes. The Agrarian Reform in 1992 launched a wave of privatization of communal land with marked consequences on rangeland resilience. While most ejidos maintained some degree of communal land ownership and use areas for risk avoidance, some pastoralists benefited from privatization through the rental market or by acquiring small-parceled pastures for supplementary forage production in drought years. Parceling and fencing plots and the establishment of water ponds in former communal lands, however have caused fragmentation of rangeland landscapes with consequences for rangeland ecological function, pastoral adaptive capacity, mobile herding and system resilience.
Results/Conclusions
In Mexico’s rangelands, pastoralists have continuously adapted to changing social, political and economic conditions for 450 years, which seemed to have had more severe impacts than potential effects of climate change; presumably because pastoralist livelihood development has always been directly coupled to the maintenance of local rangeland ecosystem services. Recent shifts in the global economy, and neoliberal policies together have become a dominant cross-scale directional force in the development of communal livelihoods, which have narrowed to livestock production at the cost of natural and cultural capital and an increasingly dysfunctional rangeland landscape. We show that while an increasing connectedness between small private pastoralist systems to global scales may jeopardize rangeland potential to feeding meat to a growing sector of global human population, newfound interests to strengthen communal efforts could counterbalance this trend. Considering rangeland landscapes as social-ecological systems with pastoralists as rangeland stewards and thus providers of multiple ecosystem goods and services, may eventually stimulate the generation and maintenance of highly resilient multifunctional rangeland landscapes. Also, fostering local pastoralist knowledge systems will naturally lead to communal adaptive capacity (to drought, price shocks, etc.) and thereby enhance local food security, pastoralist livelihoods, and rangeland sustainability as climate-resilient pathways of adaptation.