When a culture, whose economy has long been built on each family having a small herd or flock, is crowded into shrinking areas of land, what is left of the commonage?

When a culture, whose economy has long been built on each family having a small herd or flock, is crowded into shrinking areas of land, what is left of the commonage?

Are the notoriously overgrazed Lesotho mountains a case of the tragedy of the commons, where too many people selfishly plunder the commonage, taking more than their fair share? Or is the tragedy in the capturing of the commons, where the powerful elite in a society are able to claim large parts of the commonage for themselves, pressing more and more commoners onto smaller parcels of land?

The method of capture could be the notion of a title deed, defended with fences and brute force, or the construction of a nation state that throws a hard political border across grasslands where herders had long moved their animals between summer and winter pastures.

When a culture, whose economy has long been built on each family having a small herd or flock, is crowded into shrinking areas of land, what is left of the commonage? How much can that shared grazing be expected to support all those families? What does this mean for a single community - like South Africa's apartheid-era tribal...