Pastoral communities are facing mounting pressure on their livelihoods due to misconceptions about pastoralism and global trends including population growth and climate change. In this context, this article seeks to establish a correlation between pastoral land tenure systems and the sustainability of pastoralism as a production system. Using a comparative approach, we develop a taxonomy to first categorise the tenure regimes - collective and individual - of pastoralist societies of the Andean altiplano and the Kenyan savannah, and then we explore how these different regimes enable or hinder the performance of productive strategies that are key to the sustainability of pastoralism. We find that collective land tenure is positively correlated with the sustainability of pastoral production systems.