There has been a decrease in grazing mobility in the Mongolian grasslands over the past decades. Sedentary grazing with substantial external inputs has increased the cost of livestock production. As a result, the livelihoods of herders have become more vulnerable to climate variability and change. Sedentary grazing is the formal institutional arrangement in Inner Mongolia, China. However, this ...

This paper gives an overview of a proposed strategy for the “Cows and Herders” scenario given in the Multi-Agent Programming Contest 2009. The strategy is to be implemented using the Jason platform, based on the agent-oriented programming language AgentSpeak. The paper describes the agents, their goals and the strategies they should follow. The basis for the paper and for participating in the c...

An agent-based model conflict between herdsmen in east Africa using the MASON agent-based simulation environment is presented. Herders struggle to keep their herds fed and watered in a GIS-based, spatially diverse environment with data-driven seasonal cycles. The model produces realistic carrying capacity dynamics and basically plausible conflict dynamics. With the rather basic set of behaviors...

Herders’ livelihood strategies are functions of the capitals at their disposal. Although this thesis has been proved, it not applied to research in context conservation initiatives. The Chinese government implemented Grassland Ecological Compensation Policy (GECP) 2011. However, impact policy on herders’ livelihoods is still unclear. This study measured variation desert grassland Inner Mongolia...

Abstract Reindeer meat, traditional food and knowledge are vital for the culture, health, economy of Sámi reindeer herders. Nevertheless, practices meat smoking have barely been part scientific research or herding management. We investigated herders’ approach to in Northern Norway performed tent, lávvu . The investigation included workshops, interviews, participatory observations, co-analyze me...

BACKGROUND The indigenous Nenets reindeer herders in northern Russia annually migrate several hundred kilometers between summer and winter pastures. In the warming climate, ice-rich permafrost and glaciers are being significantly reduced and will eventually disappear from parts of the Arctic. The emergent changes in hydrological cycles have already led to substantial increases in open water tha...

We model interhousehold transfers between nomadic livestock herders as the statedependent consequence of individuals’ strategic interdependence resulting from the existence of multiple, opposing externalities. A public good security externality among individuals sharing a social (e.g., ethnic) identity in a potentially hostile environment creates incentives to band together. Self-interested int...

In this paper, we discuss a voting model with two candidates, C 0 and C 1. We consider two types of voters–herders and independents. The voting of independents is based on their fundamental values; on the other hand, the voting of herders is based on the number of previous votes. We can identify two kinds of phase transitions. One is an information cascade transition similar to a phase transiti...

Observational learning is an important information aggregation mechanism. However, it occasionally leads to a state in which an entire population chooses a suboptimal option. When this occurs and whether it is a phase transition remain unanswered. To address these questions we perform a voting experiment in which subjects answer a two-choice quiz sequentially with and without information about ...