Rendering homogenous and incompatible: Pastoral grazing in Tanzania's village land forest reserves

Over the past 30 years, participatory forestry reforms have been attempted across much of the world. Ostensibly, these have been attempts at rolling back the enclosures of forests that characterized the colonial era. However, a vast and still-growing body of literature documents how the spread and significance of these reforms have been limited by resistance from forestry bureaucracies hesitant to give up control. In this article, I examine this conundrum from the perspective of grazing, which has been and continues to be a major use of landscapes with trees in Tanzania. By reviewing policies, legislation, and presidential and ministerial parliamentary speeches, I show how colonial tropes thrive in national-level governance circles, problematizing grazing in all forest spaces. Granted the institutional ambiguities and legal lacuna, the state succeeds in mobilizing homogenizing discourses of incompatibility. These discourses blur the differences between the categories of forest reserves and pathologize pastoralists as the 'other.' The analysis indicates that participatory forestry reforms cannot proceed in the absence of broader decolonization in the understanding of the values and capacities of (rural) communities.