10 Unmaking the Commons: Collective Action, Property Rights, and Resource Appropriation among (Agro-)Pastoralists in Eastern Ethiopia

In Ethiopian development policies, pastoralist areas have recently attracted more attention. Funding for (agro-)pastoralist development has increased significantly in the past decade. However, much debate and policy advice are still based on stereotypical representations of pastoralist areas as backward, prone to starvation and food insecurity, and hotbeds of violent conflict and contraband trade. Policy has also been based on modernist thinking among the ruling elite, which considers pastoralism an outdated mode of life that needs to be directed toward the path of modernity (that is, sedentary farming, urban life), and on technical interventions that focus on (partial) sedentarization of pastoralists (Hogg 1996; Moris 1999; Gadamu 2000; Yacob 2000; FDRE, Ministry of Federal Affairs 2002; FDRE, Ministry of Finance and Economic Development 2003; Hagmann 2006). A kind of highlander (sedentary farming) versus lowlander (pastoralist) dichotomy continues to prevail in public discourse and provides a discursive “clash of civilizations” between the ruling elite, which originated in the highlands, and the Somalis (and other pastoralist lowlanders), who consider themselves politically marginalized (Hogg 1997; Manger 2000; Gebre 2001; Abdulahi 2004). This highland bias (Yacob 2000) in the state’s policies and politics toward the pastoralist lowlands has resulted in land tenure policies that have largely ignored the specificities of the pastoralist lowlands (Gadamu 1994; Helland 2006; Abdulahi 2007). The highland bias considers sedentarization the precondition of progress in the pastoral rangelands (Moris 1999; FDRE, Ministry of Finance and Economic Development 2003). Typically, the state aided the expansion of agriculture into the lowlands but failed to regulate the tenure transformations that accompanied the diversification of rural resource use (Hagmann 2006). The arid and semiarid lowlands continue to be considered a reserve of “large tracts of unsettled land” to be developed through sedentarization and 10 Unmaking the Commons: Collective Action, Property Rights, and Resource Appropriation among (Agro-)Pastoralists in Eastern Ethiopia