Date: August 10, 2026
Moving Rights Forward, this guide’s companion report, documented the legal recognition of pastoralists’ and Mobile Peoples’ mobility and access rights. This guide is structured to serve as a tool to advance legal, policy, and implementation reforms. Where Moving Rights Forward focused on mobility and access alone, this guide reviews the minimum set of rights that must be legally recognized for pastoralist and mobile livelihoods to be secure, including the specific rights of women within these systems. The rights considered under this framework include: mobility; access and use; management and governance; consultation, extending to free, prior and informed consent (FPIC); and due process, dispute resolution, and compensation.
This reform guide is informed by the cross-country legal findings of a database covering seven countries and 10 tenure regimes across Africa, Asia, and Latin America (Bolivia, Kenya, Mongolia, Nepal, Niger, Peru, and Tanzania) and is presented here as a practical tool for legislators, national human rights institutions, international convening bodies (including under the Rio Conventions), pastoralist and Mobile Peoples’ organizations, and donors.
Throughout, this guide is grounded in the voices and demands of pastoralist and Mobile Peoples’ organizations, and in the wider body of international instruments that collectively form the basis for the reforms detailed here. With the International Year of Rangelands and Pastoralists, it is now the time for pastoralists and other Mobile Peoples to be recognized as the solution-holders and stewards they are, rather than treated as a threat to the lands they have sustained for generations. Recognition at the international level, however, has yet to translate into protection at the national level and policy across conventional bodies such as the three Rio Conventions. It is this very gap that this guide sets out to close.