Doctoral Dissertation Research: Farmer-Herder Conflict, Environmental Change, and Institutional Response in Mali

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In dryland sub-Saharan Africa, local institutions will play a critical role in climate change adaptation yet little is known about how they mediate issues relating to resource access, competition, and conflict in vulnerable areas. A crucial climate change adaptation strategy in these areas is agropastoral mobility, which demands sophisticated institutions that function across spatial scales. The premise of this project is that the Republic of Mali, as a model of democratic decentralization, provides an excellent case for addressing these and other critical issues relating to resource-dependent livelihoods in rural dryland areas. The research objective of this project is to examine the connections between changing systems of local governance, resource access, conflict, and environmental change in Mali by answering three interrelated questions. These questions focus on three specific areas of change: 1) the influence of decentralization on shared resource access arrangements between settled farmers and mobile herders; 2) the impact of land cover and vegetation change on livestock movements; and 3) how these institutional and environmental changes are affecting farmer-herder relations. In order to answer these questions, this project integrates three components of multi-temporal institutional and biophysical analyses of dryland resource access. First, it utilizes longitudinal comparative analysis of four Malian municipalities that are following divergent institutional trajectories vis-a-vis resource access. The second is a multi-scale participatory land use and cover change (LUCC) analysis that focuses on broad scale agricultural expansion linked to village-scale changes in the spatial patterning of cropped fields. The last component focuses on the measurement and interpretation of inter-annual trends in vegetation phenology. This activity includes a participatory exercise with livestock herders designed to understand the implications of changing phenology patterns for their livelihoods.The trans-disciplinary and place-based approach of this project not only contributes to the scholarship on dryland agrarian livelihoods; it also opens new theoretical avenues for the study of coupled social-ecological systems more generally. This enables the project to critically engage with the hypothesis that changing environmental conditions are a potential driver of political conflict in sub-Saharan Africa. Engagement with the scholarship on resource conflict will also produce relevant insights for the study of decentralized governance and common property resource management. The project outcomes will have direct relevance for the livelihoods of smallholder farmers and herders through its investigation of how equitably local institutions provide resource access to competing user groups. A related impact comes through its study of how effectively these institutions manage everyday disputes over resource access and prevent them from escalating into larger social conflicts. These are two of the most pressing challenges facing local authorities across dryland sub-Saharan Africa.