I have started working on my book manuscript Emergent Commons: How Pastoralists avoid a Tragedy of the Commons in West Africa at the Netherlands Institute of Advanced Studies (NIAS) in Wassenaar, the Netherlands.

The book, to be published by Princeton University Press, is about how mobile pastoralists in West Africa manage common-pool grazing resources in a situation of open access and how scientists come to understand (and misunderstand) these open systems. Central to the book is the concept of complex adaptive systems, which offers new ways to think about management of common-pool resources in social-ecological systems. I am using the conceptual and methodological tools of complexity to solve the paradox of pastoralists’ management of open access in the Logone Floodplain of Cameroon. I will show how these tools can be used to study the management of common-pool resources in a wide range of different resource systems that also have open access, including marine fisheries, and that these represent a particular kind of commons: emergent commons.