Hi Tom.
We are talking about vast landscapes here, like the 2 million square miles in the Horn of Africa where livestock herders subsist by following seasonal rains across regional borders. However, we still have many more people living without adequate water for household and to grow their food, so a scalable cheap device that secures water (even dirty water) is highly welcome

Dear Carolina
You may be familiar with the "perfect storm" concept,where a combination of unrelated factors aggregate to produce extraordinary effects. Take the Sub-Saharan Africa´s drylands for instance.
In the bio-physical sphere: Population growth, environmental degradation and droughts induced by climate change.
In the social dimension: bad laws, corrupt politics and ineffective institutions undermine traditional leadership and social order that determined negotiated settlements within and between different communities
In the economic arena: demographic change shifted consumption towards water-intensive foods such as meat and cereals that demand more blue water and thus take up more land for irrigation. This demand for meat drives the cattle rustling exacerbated by proliferation of guns across porous borders, while demand for cereals privatises large tracts of common land.
The confluence of adverse factors from these three spheres has made it impossible for governments in the regional to find simple solutions especially through legislation, security measures or even through normal development projects.
Thus, observing that even in regions (Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, Yemen...Chad, Nigeria..Mali...the immense firepower, political process and development assistance offered has failed to work, is it not intuitive that the process should start with restoring the authority of the custodians of community values- the elders and traditional leaders that have soft but binding power, respected for their wisdom and community interests?
Even for such complex array of issues like climate change, contested land/water, reversing degradation will not be resolved unless a process rooted in social order is nourished