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

在干旱的撒哈拉以南非洲，地方机构将在适应气候变化方面发挥关键作用，但人们对它们如何调解与脆弱地区的资源获取、竞争和冲突有关的问题知之甚少。在这些地区，适应气候变化的一个关键战略是农牧流动，这需要复杂的机构在空间范围内发挥作用。该项目的前提是，马里共和国作为民主权力下放的典范，为解决这些和其他与农村旱地地区依赖资源的生计有关的关键问题提供了一个很好的案例。这个项目的研究目标是通过回答三个相互关联的问题来考察马里不断变化的地方治理制度、资源获取、冲突和环境变化之间的联系。这些问题集中在三个具体的变化领域：1)权力下放对定居农民和流动牧民之间共享资源获取安排的影响；2)土地覆盖和植被变化对牲畜流动的影响；3)这些制度和环境变化如何影响农牧民关系。为了回答这些问题，该项目综合了旱地资源获取的多时期机构和生物物理分析的三个组成部分。首先，它利用对马里四个市镇的纵向比较分析，这些市镇在资源获取方面遵循着不同的体制轨迹。第二个是多尺度参与性土地利用和覆盖变化(LUCC)分析，其重点是广泛的农业扩展与村庄规模的耕地空间格局变化相联系。最后一部分侧重于对植被物候年际趋势的衡量和解释。这一活动包括与畜牧民的参与性活动，旨在了解改变物候模式对他们生计的影响。该项目的跨学科和以地点为基础的方法不仅有助于旱地农业生计的学术研究，还为更广泛地研究耦合的社会-生态系统开辟了新的理论途径。这使得该项目能够批判性地接受这样的假设，即不断变化的环境条件是撒哈拉以南非洲政治冲突的潜在驱动因素。参与有关资源冲突的学术活动也将为研究分权治理和共同财产资源管理提供相关的见解。项目成果将通过调查当地机构如何公平地向相互竞争的用户群体提供资源，与小农和牧民的生计直接相关。一个相关的影响来自对这些机构如何有效地管理关于资源获取的日常纠纷并防止它们升级为更大的社会冲突的研究。这是撒哈拉以南非洲干旱地区地方当局面临的两个最紧迫的挑战。

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.