ETHIOPIA-KENYA: Who rules the range?

Photo: Andrew Heavens/Flickr

For pastoral communities, the rangeland is perceived as a single, communally-owned economic resource (file photo)

LONDON, 24 October 2011 (IRIN)- The border land between Kenya and Ethiopia is a vast, open plain under a big sky. Hard red earth shows through the thin grass of the sun-baked landscape, an expanse of thorny scrub, flat-topped thorn-trees and tall red anthills. There are no fences or other visible boundaries, and few people, just occasional groups of cattle or goats with their herders. To the untutored eye it can look like empty land, where wandering nomads graze their animals at random.

But there is nothing random about it. This unpromising landscape can provide a good living for livestock if it is carefully managed, and the herds are kept on the move across the seasons so they make the optimum use of each area of pasture and each water source. Over the years, the herders have built up a great body of expertise about how best to manage the area's resources.

And the land is also definitely not "empty" in the sense that it belongs to no one - the people of the area are quite clear about whose land is whose, in terms not of individuals, but of different communities.

Sara Pavanello, who has just completed a three-year study of how natural resources are managed in the area, says: "The pastoralists I spoke to very often used collective terms, saying for example, 'Our resources, we decide, we manage…' For pastoral communities, the rangeland as a whole is perceived as one single economic resource that’s communally owned, even if this tract of rangeland has been divided by the international border. At the same time different ethnic groups own, or exercise control over specific territory and the natural resources found within it." ...read more