the political economy of changing property rights: dismantling a pastoral commons

Economic growth has brought dramatic changes to pastoral societies.' One of the many indirect effects of economic growth is greater sedentarization.2 Sedentarization in turn increases the threat of overgrazing, rendering many common grazing systems no longer viable. Although in the past such systems were routinely changed to prevent overgrazing, pastoralists have recently had less success in restructuring their commons systems. The roots of their failure lie in the economic and political changes brought on by economic growth. Economic growth has increased the gains to be had from dismantling the commons while also making it harder to reach agreement about how to distribute those gains. Sedentarization has increased the costs of maintaining common grazing, and growing economic diversification within pastoral societies has created groups that want very different property rights. At the same time, the replacement of local government by national government has changed the balance of power within, as well as between, groups. To illustrate the changing economics and politics of common property in pastoral societies, we examine the case of the Galole Orma of Kenya. The Orma of northeastern Kenya are riverine pastoralists. They are an Islamic, Eastern Cushitic-speaking people of the Oromo language group. Together with the Boran and others, the Orma were part of the greater Oromo expansion of the late 1500s, which overran much of southern Ethiopia and northeastern Kenya. The current homeland of the Orma is the Tana River district in Kenya, on the west bank of the Tana River, with particularly heavy concentration in the Tana River delta and some settlements in the Lamu district to the east of the Tana. The Orma depend largely on cattle, with lesser numbers of small stock (sheep and goats) and virtually no camels. They increasingly supplement their pastoral production with farming along the flood plains of the Tana River and the many seasonal rivers that cross-cut the territory from west to east. The Galole Orma inhabit the middle portion of the Tana River district along the banks of the east-west Galole River, which flows into the Tana at Hola. In 1979 39 percent of Galole households were settled in villages with shops and were strongly integrated into the market economy as commercial beef producers. The other 61 percent were less involved in the market economy and were to some extent nomadic. The nontown households were generally more nearly selfEconomic growth has led to the breakdown of systems of common grazing in many African pastoral societies. These systems continue to fail because economic differentiation and diversification prevent pastoralists from agreeing on a replacement system. We develop a new institutional model of this process. Our analysis focuses on changes in the economics and politics of pastoral property rights and on public attitudes about the distribution of the costs and benefits of those changes. We apply our model to the case of the Galole Orma of Kenya. [new institutional economics, political economy, commons, pastoralism, Africa, property rights]