Exploring incentives for rangeland enclosures among pastoral and agropastoral households in eastern Ethiopia

This paper examines the incentives driving expansion of rangeland enclosure. It explores the role of customary authorities in defining and enforcing rights to private use of land and attempts to scrutinize whether informal rules emerge to respond to these needs and even become an incentive to establish private enclosures as well as to delineate the processes and actors involved. Based on household level data and group discussion with customary leaders and state agents, results indicate that there are endogenous and exogenous driving forces for range enclosure and change in land use. Institutional diversity is inherent across the cases studied, where this is closely linked to the nature of benefits from enclosure and the underlying incentives. Though signs of state support for enclosure are evident via assessing the role of lower level state administrators in allocation of land for private grazing, policy support for private land use cannot fully explain the gradual shift in de facto property rights. The role of socio-economic and ecological changes is much more important and has widespread influence, where the influence of the former emerges from the economic changes taking place in the rest of the economy, including the rising livestock price.