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

Economic 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 ]