My presentation Pastoralists’ Governance of Common-Pool Resources: Working toward a Synthesis for the IASC 2020 Web Conference on African Commons is available online. It is work in progress for the SESYNC workshop on Synthesizing Research on Pastoral Governance of Common-Pool Resources that I am co-organizing with Lance Robinson.

Here is the abstract: Pastoralists do not neatly fit the conventional model of the commons as mobility, flexibility, and adaptability results in systems without clear boundaries around the resource system and the user community. Recent studies have shown that many African pastoral systems are characterized by open access to common-pool grazing resources and that these systems are sustainable and resilient. In this paper I will present a synthesis of three theoretical models – sovereign commons, complex mosaics, and open property regimes – that have recently been developed to describe and explain these pastoral property regimes.