Abstract
In the literature on the commons, open access is considered the absence of a property regime and equated with a tragedy of the commons. However, a longitudinal study of mobile pastoralists in the Far North Region of Cameroon shows that open access is not the absence of rules and does not lead to a tragedy of the commons. Current theoretical models cannot explain this phenomenon of management of common-pool grazing resources in a situation of open access. Here I propose a new property regime – an open property regime – that solves this paradox. First, I will explain how open property regimes function as complex adaptive systems using our study of mobile pastoralists in Cameroon. Second, I will describe four other cases of pastoral systems with similar open property regimes. Finally, I discuss the key characteristics that these pastoral systems have in common and outline a new theoretical model of open property regimes.
Highlights
The goal of this paper is to propose a new property regime: an open property regime
Open property regimes work as complex adaptive systems in which independent decision-making of highly mobile households results an efficient distribution of the grazing pressure over available resources
The characteristics described above – independent and mobile users harvesting resources that are highly variable in space and time – are common in pastoral systems and it is not surprising that we have found other cases of open property regimes in our comparative study of 30 African pastoral societies (Moritz et al 2015c)
Summary
The reason is that the current four categories – open access, common property, private property, and state property – cannot adequately describe a property regime that is frequently found in mobile pastoral systems. In these pastoral systems, described below in detail, there is open access to common-pool grazing resources but, and this is critical to note, open access does not mean the absence of rules; instead it refers to the right that every pastoralist has to common-pool grazing resources. Hardin (1968) and his critics (Ostrom 1990) have forever linked pastoralists to the tragedy of the commons by using the same story of shepherds on the English commons Both Hardin and Ostrom (and many others) argue that open access to common-pool resources leads to a tragedy. The new category of open property regimes solves the problem of a misfit between current theoretical models of the commons and the social-ecological system of pastoralism in which resource distributions are highly variable in space and time and users have to be highly mobile, flexible and opportunistic in tracking the changing distribution of resources
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