Customary Tenure and Reciprocal Grazing Arrangements in Eastern Ethiopia

This article examines how customary tenure provides a basis for reciprocal access arrangements and facilitates access to grazing resources in order to adapt to changing conditions. A critical review of the literature on the range ecology and institutions of resource governance guides the overall analysis, while empirical results from three case studies show that internal social relationships and kinship structures still remain important determining factors in facilitating access to the grazing commons. Many forms of institutional arrangements exist, providing different kinds of incentives. For instance, trading of grazing rights at household level provides an important safety‐net for poor pastoral and agropastoral herders, in spite of fears regarding negative externalities for de facto co‐owners of the commons. Evidence from the three studied districts reveals that the influence of resource attributes on institutional choice favours flexibility rather than supporting the axiom of the conventional property rights theory, which considers greater exclusivity to be a natural response to scarcity. Institutions supporting reciprocal grazing relations are characterized by negotiability and by an ambiguity of rights: clan rules facilitating reciprocal grazing are not based on maximization of benefits from own grazing commons, but rather on maximization of security of use rights through investing in relations with others.