Reasserting the commons: Pastoral contestations of private and state lands in East Africa

John G Galaty

doi:10.18352/ijc.720

Abstract

The theory that land holding is inexorably evolving from common to private or state tenure is challenged by facts on the ground that this paper will examine. ‘Tenure’ is interpreted both in terms of formal law and informal practices. While the association between privatization and land fragmentation is clear, property theory has influenced privatization so the process cannot be used to validate the evolutionary model of transitions from open access to common property to private property. Although in many settings common and state property has given way to privatization, in other cases private or state property has reverted to common holdings. A dynamic tenure model would demonstrate the conditions under which tenure transitions occur between common, private and state property, as the balance between transaction and exclusion costs shifts, or when the boundaries of tenure forms weaken to allow open access to occur. Examining three scenes of tenure transitions involving Kenyan pastoralists (Laikipia County, the Rift Valley, Narok County and Kajiado County), this paper examines cases in which transaction and exclusion dynamics – which are metaphors for the institutional effects of social and territorial relations- lead to changing land-use practices and tenure transitions. In semi-arid pastoral regions, we find more fluid systems of tenure than the inexorable spread of privatization through formalized land rights and increasing land fragmentation would have suggested should occur in the 21st century.

Highlights

The theory that land holding is inexorably evolving from common to private or state tenure is challenged by facts on the ground that this paper will examine
Examining three scenes of tenure transitions involving Kenyan pastoralists (Laikipia County, the Rift Valley, Narok County and Kajiado County), this paper examines cases in which transaction and exclusion dynamics – which are metaphors for the institutional effects of social and territorial relations- lead to changing land-use practices and tenure transitions
We find a counter-current of resistance against rangeland enclosures, land fragmentation and pastoral sedentarization, animated by the exigencies of pastoralism and as responses to violence from neighbours, control by the state, or land appropriation by a rural elite (Galaty 2013b, 2015)

Summary

Introduction

The theory that land holding is inexorably evolving from common to private or state tenure is challenged by facts on the ground that this paper will examine. Given the large scale of land use practical for linking sporadic rainfall and grazing with human and livestock populations, pastoral territoriality joins wider communities to land in multiple dynamic and flexible ways (Galaty 2013a). This sort of linkage between pastoral groups and territories represent cases of “common property” in Ostrom’s (1990) sense of lands managed by defined collectivities, not Hardin’s (1968) “pastures open to all”. It is reasonable to hold that Africa’s vast arid and semi-arid regions where livestock keepers use mobility to access seasonal pastures and water are being “enclosed”, moving communally held lands into the status of legally defined states of property. What we need is a more dynamic model of conditions under which transitions occur in diverse directions between common, state and private forms of property

The evolutionary property theory and its limitations

A dynamic theory of property transitions

Conclusion

Literature cited