Co-operation in Risky Environments: Evidence from Southern Ethiopia

The semi-arid and arid rangelands of Sub-Saharan Africa arecharacterised by high variability and by heavy reliance of herderson access to common resources, predominantly pasture and water.In these systems, the capacity of the community to co-operateover resource management is critical and the effectiveness ofmanagement has a direct impact on exploitation rates and landallocation patterns. In this paper, we develop a model to capturethe impact of climatic variability on capacity to co-operateand on resulting land use and allocation patterns, and applythe model to data collected from communities located on theBorana Plateau in southern Ethiopia. Results indicate that rainfallvariability has a negative impact on stock densities, consistentwith risk-averse producer behaviour, but has no statisticallysignificant impact on land allocation patterns in this marginalarea. Furthermore, co-operation has a direct negative impacton stock densities and land allocated to private pastures. Theresults support the hypothesis that individual incentives toovergraze and encroach on common pastures can be mitigated incommunities with high co-operative capacity.