Desertification, or land degradation in drylands, is a serious environmental problem in South Africa with tremendous socio-economic consequences. Land users' perspectives on land management practices and knowledge about their rangelands have been poorly represented in the discourse of land degradation in South Africa. We addressed this knowledge gap by examining three participatory methods to capture local knowledge and perspectives, as well as the relation between knowledge, attitude and practice status relative to three land management actions done by livestock farmers in the South African Kalahari. Photo elicitation captured a greater level of detail and new information compared to semi-structured interviews alone, while enhancing researchers' understanding of farmers' knowledge and perception in multiple ways. The photovoice group discussions led to farmers' engagement in reflective dialogues, which facilitated mutual learning among the farmers. We found that a high level of knowledge and positive attitude alone did not always result in actual full scale practice. Situational factors such as limited financial resources, inadequate farm infrastructure, farm size, and land tenure were given by farmers as constraints or challenges to their land management. We further examined how effective local knowledge and remotely sensed data were in assessing the veld condition in the Kalahari Duneveld. The farmers' assessment of veld condition corresponded to field measured grass, shrub and bare ground cover. The three vegetation metrics calculated from remotely sensed images (i.e., Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), Soil-Adjusted Vegetation Index (SAVI), and the tasseled cap greenness) all correlated poorly to the measured vegetation cover because of the excess spectral noise caused by the high iron oxide content in the Kalahari sand. Local perspectives and knowledge have potential to augment traditional ground-based rangeland assessment and contribute in the combat against desertification by offering a more holistic view of land management.

Assessment of the myriad of historic attempts to manage and/or restore degraded drylands offers a rich opportunity to learn from the past, particularly if conducted with full stakeholder engagement. Participatory environmental assessment of past land management and restoration actions would contribute to the improvement of future management techniques in a way relevant to the concerns of people involved with or impacted by these actions. This can also help to deal with the often scant information available, conflicting values and perceptions among stakeholders, and the uncertainties inherent to complex dryland systems. In this study I applied and evaluated a participatory protocol that incorporated multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) tools to assess five actions in the San Simon watershed, one of the most extreme examples of degradation and human intervention in southeastern Arizona (U.S.). The participatory assessment process included a semi-structured interview, elicitation of local-based assessment criteria, prioritization of the assessment criteria, estimation of data, a MCDA-based integration and group evaluation of final results. The process was used to evaluate five combinations of grazing management, vegetation management and hydraulic structures implemented between the 1940s and 1980s. The application of this process allowed me to not only evaluate these actions in a participatory way, but also to identify and compare values and perceptions connected to the historic, cultural and scientific narratives used by three different categories of stakeholders (researchers, practitioners and land users). The revised Simos' procedure used to elicit assessment criteria weights proved useful to expose values and perceptions, source of the individual criteria priorities, while revealing conflictive points of views among the stakeholders. The outranking-facilitated participatory assessment, when compared to the unaided baseline assessment, proved useful in making stakeholder preferences explicit in the form of evaluation criteria and weights, while incorporating data and uncertainty. The specific MCDA outranking integration model used, ELECTRE IS, proved to be simple and systematically synthetic, helping stakeholders structure and re-evaluate their unaided assessments. The results of this study provide insights in how stakeholders' knowledge and views can be elicited, explored and effectively incorporated to assess and learn from past land management and restoration actions implemented in drylands.