Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant: Migration, Land Use, and Resource Control

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Graduate student Nicole M. Smith, working under the direction of Dr. J. Terrence McCabe, will undertake twelve months of field research in Simanjiro District, northern Tanzania. She will investigate the environmental consequences of migration as a livelihood diversification strategy by Maasai pastoralists, asking how and to what extent new migration patterns are impacting land use decisions and resource control. Because of drought, declining land base, and other factors, Simanjiro district has experienced out-migration for over a decade. Recently there has been a change in the nature of this migration. Instead of migrating to cities for unskilled work, men are increasingly being sent by their families into the Mererani region where, once they acquire new skills, they become well-paid middlemen in the Tanzanite gem mining industry. These new migrants then return with wealth and status, which gives them increased power over land use and resource allocation. Smith will look at the local effects of their new influence by collecting several different kinds of ethnographic data in two villages for which extensive baseline data are already available. She will conduct semi-structured interviews with households and individuals, hold focus groups with village and Village Land Committee members, and collect individual life-histories. This information will be used to identify the different migration practices and the households and individuals involved with each, the processes behind decisions to migrate and actual migration experiences, and the relationships between migration and land use, and migration and resource control and allocation. In addition, extant data on the region will allow her to look at these effects from a longitudinal perspective.This research will contribute to developing more dynamic socioecological theory in social science. Northern Tanzania is one of the most contentious areas of the world in terms of land use, wildlife conservation and local livelihoods, and lessons learned there can have policy implications in many other places, including the United States. The research also will support the education of a graduate student.