Herders' Territorialities and Social Differentiation in Western Burkina Faso

Abstract

International audienceSome authors have linked the question of inequalities among pastoralists to rights of access to pastureland, but their analyses of pastoralists' rights of access generally focused on the privatisation of pastureland. We reveal that a wider range of power relations between farmers and herders, local and national institutions affects pastoralists' rights of access to pastureland. We demonstrate that socio-economic inequalities among the Fulbe people are linked to the unequal capacity of pastoralists to manage territorialisation processes to their own advantage. Reciprocally, the entrenchment of the territories that results from these processes reifies inequalities between pastoralists. (Résumé d'auteur

Institutions and Pastoralist Conflicts in Africa: A Conceptual Framework

“…As the analyses would show, these dynamics can be understood from a three-dimensional framework comprising institutional change, institutional pluralism, and institutional meanings, and a typical case in Ghana will be used to empirically illustrate this framework. This objective to conceptualise a common institutional framework for pastoralist conflicts in Africa is necessary because many of the African cases have a significant cross-border dimension (Gonin & Gautier, 2016;Idowu, 2017), and as our discussion of the literature would show, there is a shared institutional environment across the continent. Yet, institution making and interpretation have become spaces of fierce contention and confusion within academic and policy debates.…”

“…This objective to conceptualise a common institutional framework for pastoralist conflicts in Africa is necessary because many of the African cases have a significant cross-border dimension (Gonin & Gautier, 2016; Idowu, 2017), and as our discussion of the literature would show, there is a shared institutional environment across the continent. Yet, institution making and interpretation have become spaces of fierce contention and confusion within academic and policy debates.…”

Pastoralists and peasants: perspectives on agrarian change

“…Key themes include the importance of links with agricultural peoples, through various forms of exchange and entrustment (Bassett 1994;White 1990;Blench 1985), such as exchanges of manure for grazing on crop fields (Toulmin 1983), as well as shifts to agro-pastoralism; the importance of markets and trade (Turner and Williams 2002;Amanor 1995), including changes in transhumance routes from the dry Sahelian region to the coast to the south (Moritz et al 2015;Turner et al 2011;Turner and Hiernaux 2008;Bassett and Turner 2007); the management of labour availability and quality for herding (Turner 1999) and changing ownership patterns (White 1990), including the emergence of absentee herders and urban-based pastoralists, with links to the pastoral hinterlands (Moritz 2012). Across the region, a sense of a dynamic, but fast-changing, variegated pastoral economy is evident, with increasing inequality (Gonin and Gautier 2016;Sutter 1987). A different relationship between to demography and resources to that posited elsewhere emphasises adaptations to changes in grazing resources involving intensification, extensification and movement to new areas (Moritz et al 2009), alongside changing relationships between production, property and politics (Benjaminsen and Lund 2001).…”

Designing sustainable pathways for the livestock sector: the example of Atsbi, Ethiopia and Bama, Burkina Faso

“…Indeed, agro-pastoralists today already perceive changes that may be attributable to climate change (Kima et al, 2015). Critical to success will be pasture land management, which is partly a task for the government but also for the pastoral communities themselves (Gonin & Gautier, 2016).…”