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INSTITUTIONS, GOVERNANCE, AND INCENTIVES IN
COMMON PROPERTY REGIMES FOR AFRICAN RANGELANDS
February, 1992
Brent M. Swallow, Agricultural Economist
International Livestock Centre for Africa
Nairobi, Kenya
and
Daniel W. Bromley, Anderson-Bascom Professor of Agricultural Economics and Acting Director
Institute for Environmental Studies
University of Wisconsin-Madison.
bromley@aae.wisc.edu
Posted with permission of Professor Daniel Bromley
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INTRODUCTION
Africans keep about 14 percent of the world's cattle, and 21 percent of the sheep and goats, on a land base that comprises 25 percent of the world's total area of rangeland. The number of people engaged in extensive livestock production is higher in Africa than in any other region of the world. Of the 30 to 40 million pastoralists in the world--people who rely on extensive livestock production for most of their income and subsistence needs--over half reside in Africa. Ethiopia, Kenya, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Somalia and Sudan have the world's largest populations of pastoralists.
The forage and water resources of most African rangelands are shared by several individuals, households, or village groups. This shared use of natural resources received its early indictment in the fisheries literature when writers began, unfortunately, to refer to the open access fishery as a "common property resource." Garrett Hardin, seeking to make a point about uncontrolled population growth, coined the allegorical phrase, "the tragedy of the commons (Hardin 1968)." To make his point, he invoked the proverbial grazing pasture in which each separate owner of cattle had no incentive to control grazing pressure. For some reason, few questioned the Hardin link between parents deciding to have more children, and a community of graziers deciding how many cattle to place on the range. By mixing metaphors, Hardin seems to have induced an entire generation of economists and development assistance experts to believe that livestock management was no different from couples having babies. Those intent on individualizing (i.e. "privatizing") African land tenure so as to make it conform with prior ideological notions found much comfort in the Hardin allegory. A paper about population policy became, instead, the "theoretical" foundation for grazing policy on an entire continent.
Repeated challenges to the applicability of the "tragedy of the commons" model have prompted a surge of interest in common property. It has been pointed out that collectively-used natural resources are usually regulated by resource management regimes that approach the conceptual essence of common property (res communes). Here we consider a common property regime to be a set of ordered institutional arrangements that define the conditions of access to, and control over, a stream of benefits arising from collectively-used natural resources. Despite the insights provided by the new theory of common property, there continues to be a general lack of understanding about the operation and evolution of African rangeland regimes. Compounded by misunderstandings about the dynamics of rangeland ecological processes, this lack of understanding has resulted in a series of inappropriate land tenure policies and failed interventions.
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