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The Gascoyne River catchment in arid Western Australia was presented as a desertification case study at the United Nations Conference on Desertification in Nairobi in 1977. The Gascoyne is similar to many other areas in Western Australia that were seriously degraded following the introduction of domestic livestock in the late 19th century. However, there have been many improvements in land management since the 1970s, with good evidence that much of the rangelands are now in better condition. These improvements have been the result of a combination of factors, including: a comprehensive resource inventory; range assessment and ongoing monitoring information; a mixture of regulation and empowerment; capacity-building using a variety of approaches; and regional scale strategies aimed at taking a co-ordinated approach to land management issues. A strong emphasis on science was used to address technical issues and to improve the understanding of ecosystem dynamics. of course, individual land managers play the primary role in land management. It is their day-to-day decisions that determine whether the land will continue to degrade or improve. In Western Australia, land managers are better educated than in the past, have a better sense of community expectations for land management and generally practice a more benign style of land management than their forebears.