Most of the pastoralists in the drylands of East and West Africa share a strong ethos of open access to common-pool grazing resources. They believe that every pastoralist has the same rights to use grazing lands, regardless of ethnicity, nationality, seniority, or socio-economic status. They emphatically argue that access is free and open for everyone; it does not matter where pastoralists come from, whether they are newcomers or old-timers or what is their ethnicity or nationality. For pastoralists, keeping cattle is not only a way of making a living, but cattle are life because without them people cannot live as pastoralists. In this sense, to deny cattle access to grazing resources is to deny pastoralists life (Moritz et al. 2013).

 

A large proportion of the rangelands that dominate Africa’s drylands are open access. Historically, there have been relatively few conflicts among African pastoralists over rights to common-pool grazing resources. However, pastoralists do not live in a world made up only of pastoralists. They co-exist with other user groups, including farmers and fishermen, who do not share their ethos and practice of open access. And farmers view grazing lands as lands that have not yet been made productive—this is one of the threats to common-pool grazing resources (Sayre et al. 2013). This results in an agricultural expansion onto seasonal grazing lands and the transhumance corridors connecting them (Galvin 2009; Moritz 2006). It may be precisely because of open access, or failure of common property regimes, that these areas are open to agricultural expansion.

 

Many governments in East and West Africa have tried to protect pastoral resources and the rights of pastoralists to use these resources from agricultural expansion by designating agricultural and pastoral zones and delimiting transhumance corridors. These solutions have been implemented at local as well as national levels in the forms of rural or pastoral codes (Hesse 2000). 

While much attention has been focused on problems of implementation and governance of rural codes (Flintan 2012; Hesse and Trench 2000; Tielkes and Schlecht 2001), there has been less discussion of the conflict between the flexibility and openness of the pastoral system and the fixing and delimitation of resources and resource use through the delimitation of pastoral zones and transhumance corridors. Turner (1999) has warned that there is a risk in formalizing pastoral tenure institutions into rural codes where flexibility is more appropriate for managing access to common-pool grazing resources, especially where there is considerable variation in the distribution of these resources through time and space. If tenure institutions become more formal and rigid, this can limit mobility, with potentially negative consequences for resilience. 

 

Governments in East and West Africa have not always supported mobile pastoralists’ use of common-pool grazing resources, for several reasons. First, while pastoralists are integrated into regional, national and international livestock markets that reach millions of consumers, most of the trade is informal and invisible (Catley et al. 2013; McPeak et al. 2011). Governments therefore naturally favor the interests of agriculturalists, whose production is more visible and more easily taxed (Behnke and Kerven 2013). Second, national laws are generally better at protecting the user rights of sedentary farmers over the grazing rights of mobile pastoralists, in part because mobile pastoralists do not remain in one location throughout the year, but also because pastoralists are not seen as making investments in the land, which is often a condition for obtaining tenure rights. Third, the processes of decentralization across Africa have resulted in more local control over natural resources, mostly at the level of municipalities. While decentralization works well for farmers who stay within a particular municipality throughout the year, that is not the case for mobile pastoralists who move through and use common-pool grazing resources in multiple municipalities over the course of a year. This means that decentralization and local control over natural resources are not accommodating mobile pastoral systems and are not appropriate for the governance of common-pool grazing resources in these systems (Marty 1993).

 

One of the key lessons of the ‘paradox of pastoral land tenure’ is the need of pastoralists for secure access to pasture and water, but also flexibility in resource use (Fernández-Giménez 2002). The critical lesson here is that governance needs to focus on supporting the flexibility of pastoral mobility in an open system, and this is not achieved by mapping, fixing and delimiting the corridors, which may even have the opposite effect. The interests in support of pastoral mobility at the national and regional level are often not aligned with those at the local level, where government officials and traditional authorities tend to have primarily agricultural constituencies. At the national level, authorities benefit from the free movement of cattle because of taxes and other levies on pastoralists and livestock traders, whereas at the local level, authorities derive most of their income from agricultural populations.

 

 

Behnke, Roy, and Carol Kerven. 2013. Counting costs: replacing pastoralirm with irrigated agriculture in the Awash Valley. In Pastoralism and development: Dynamic change at the margins, edited by A. Catley, J. Lind and I. Scoones. London: Routledge and Earthscan.