Managing the Natural Capital Base of Pastoralism

This chapter begins with a section that aims to cultivate an elementary understanding of an aspect of the economics of natural resource use, with a view to providing a simple theoretical framework for analyzing the extraction of the patchy renewable natural capital of dryland pastoral ecosystems. Some essential theoretical topics are borrowed from the economics of natural resource use to establish basic links and a related insight that may help further our thoughts in the context of dryland pastoralism. It introduces the bioeconomic theory commonly used in natural resource economics to draw relevant insights of crucial significance for examining certain pertinent issues in pastoralism. It distills a conceptual background that is fairly relevant to understanding the essentials of pastoral rangeland resource use across different property rights regimes. The chapter introduces the commonly identified property rights regimes and theoretically demonstrates that, unlike the open-access case, the pastoralist indigenous institutions of common property rights are supposed to have inbuilt mechanisms to limit individual actions, thereby avoiding extreme resource degradation for the common good and the sustainable livelihoods of pastoralist societies. Related issues of perceptions and changing views of pastoralism and development are also discussed. It is highlighted that the management of pastoral commons in African arid and semi-arid rangelands has been discussed within competing paradigms, each informed by models with distinct assumptions and predictions. The limitations of “the tragedy of the commons” narrative and the equilibrium paradigm are critically highlighted. It is noted that the disequilibrium thinking appears to have informed the general understanding of the positive features of traditional pastoral common-property resource management and of the nature of African dryland ecology. It has recognized the importance of mobility and the critical role of indigenous institutions in managing the natural capital base of pastoralism.