Multiple tournaments and sustained defection: Why do negotiations fail to secure resource access between pastoral and agropastoral groups in Ethiopia?

This article uses analytic narratives to explore the reasons why negotiations over rights to grazing resources repeatedly fail between neighboring pastoral and agropastoral communities. While many writers link resource scarcity, the resulting competition and state institutional failure as common drivers for conflict among multiple resource users in the semi-arid pastoral areas, the causes for violent conflict and the failure of local level negotiations between groups need to be explained in the framework of geopolitical context and the rent earned from perpetrating violence. This study reveals how economic incentives from livestock raids and the unrestricted access to conflict technology reinforce each other and jointly undermine the success of negotiations in producing favorable outcomes. The undesirable outcomes from negotiation failure can be expressed in terms of rent dissipation, rangeland resource degradation, increased instability and the potential for increased vulnerability and deterioration of agropastoral welfare.