This Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) award will fund research by Dr. Mark Moritz, Ohio State University, to advance our understanding of pastoral management of social-ecological systems. Specifically, the project examines how mobile pastoralists in the Logone floodplain in the Far North Province of Cameroon coordinate their movements to avoid conflict and overgrazing in a land tenure system that is commonly described as open access, a situation generally regarded as leading to a tragedy of the commons. The hypothesis is that this management system is best understood as a case of emerging complexity, in which individual decision-making, coordination of movements among pastoralists, and participation in an information sharing network result in the emergence of a complex adaptive system in which access to and use of grazing resources is managed. The hypothesis will be tested in a multidisciplinary study of pastoral mobility that integrates spatial and ethnographic analyses as well as multi-agent simulations and analytical modeling.
The research is critically important for its ecological and theoretical implications. The research will elucidate how these emergent systems work without central coordination to manage rangelands across West Africa, where open access systems are common. The findings from this research can be applied to the management of common property resources worldwide. In addition, this project will be one of the first to apply theories of complex adaptive systems to rangeland management.
The project also has a significant educational component. It will train undergraduate and graduate students from multiple disciplines to become the new generation of scientists and policy makers who have the interdisciplinary skill set and perspective needed to analyze complex environmental problems and contribute to their solution. A special effort will be made to recruit minority students from groups that have traditionally been underrepresented in the sciences. A portion of the funding will support the development of lab facilities for use by undergraduate and graduate students conducting ethnographic, statistical, and spatial analysis, multi-agent simulations, and analytical modeling of complex social-ecological systems.
The goal of this project was to come to a better understanding of management of common-pool resources in a situation of open access. Specifically, the study examined how mobile pastoralists in the Logone Floodplain coordinate their movements to avoid conflict and overgrazing in a tenure system that is commonly described as open access, a situation generally regarded as leading to a tragedy of the commons. The hypothesis was that this management system is best understood as a complex adaptive system, in which individual decision-making, habitual movements, and participation in an information sharing network result in an Ideal Free Distribution (IFD) in which the distribution of mobile pastoralists matches the distribution of the available grazing resources. In the last six years researchers at the Ohio State University have evaluated this hypothesis in an interdisciplinary study of pastoral mobility that integrated spatial and ethnographic analyses as well as computer simulations. The studies have yielded evidence in support of the hypothesis that the management system in the Logone floodplain is a self-organizing complex adaptive system. We have found evidence that the distribution of grazing pressure is proportional to the distribution of grazing resources within the floodplain. We have argued that this ideal free distribution is an indication that there is management of open access and have used multi-agent simulations to examine the dynamic processes by which mobile pastoralists achieve an ideal free distribution. We have published findings from our ethnographic and spatial analyses, and computer simulations in 12 peer-reviewed articles. Understanding how these emergent systems work is critical for the management of rangelands across West Africa, most of which have some form of open access, as well as other resource systems with open access, including marine fisheries.
