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Reconciling Flexibility and Tenure Security for Pastoral Resources: the Geography of Transhumance Networks in Eastern Senegal

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Abstract

The need to maintain or increase livestock mobility in arid Africa has been widely embraced by ecologists, social scientists, and more recently regional governments. These movements are seen to sustain livestock production under a highly variable and changing climate. At the same time, livestock mobility is threatened by the expansion of agriculture onto rangelands. A major conundrum raised in the pastoral development literature is the potential contradiction of the need for spatially-fixed, exclusionary forms of tenure to protect key pastoral resources with the need for socially-porous open systems of resource tenure that ensure flexible access. This has been called the “paradox of pastoral land tenure.” By adopting a transhumance corridor network approach, this paper demonstrates that there is a middle ground where flexible access can be maintained within a fixed network of corridors. A transhumance network includes not only the physical paths or corridors followed by livestock herds but also the encampment sites where livestock pass the night while moving along corridors and the water sources linked to encampment site. This study mapped and characterized 5000 km of corridors, 744 encampments, and 1010 water points in eastern Senegal. These pastoral features form a network of interconnected resources providing alternative options for travel, water, and forage as herds move along a north–south trajectory. The research analyzes spatial variation in the network’s ability to provide these services (water, quality forage, and travel) as influenced by rainfall variability, cropping pressure, and social institutions. Four distinct zones within the study area were compared with analyses showing variation among them in the importance of different factors shaping access. More broadly, the study demonstrates that extant transhumance networks accommodate the competing needs of pastoral tenure security by facilitating herd movements in response to changing resource availabilities through a series of spatially-fixed components (encampment sites, water points, and corridors) that can be recognized and protected through legislation. Thus, the demands for tenure security and flexible patterns of resource use can both be potentially accommodated.

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Notes

  1. Corridors, while common, are not ubiquitous in West African pastoral systems. Without cropping pressure, seasonal herd movements between encampment sites do not follow a single path unless possible routes are limited by topography, vegetation density, forage and water access. As cropped fields become more prevalent, broad bands of movement narrow to roughly-parallel paths intertwining within a 500–1000 m swath to narrower more recognizable paths of 5–100 m in width, worn by repeated passage of livestock.

  2. After noting that livestock mobility is limited within the Ferlo Boundou, Gomez (1979, pg 45) does state that there are some dry-season movements in the region toward the river valley (in the north) and to the south.

  3. A number of sources point to one of the meanings of the word windé (pl billé) in Pulaar is a manured area for cropping or site of a former village (Schmitz 1986) in addition to that of a pastoral encampment site which is its dominant meaning for Fulfulde dialects elsewhere in the region. Thus, historically, “encampment site” is a place, away from a permanent village, where both farming and livestock rearing occurs – as much a cultivation hamlet as a pastoral encampment site.

  4. In addition, significant westward trekking of Malian livestock destined for Dakar is important within the study area (Magrin et al. 2011). The trends of reduced access to floodplain pastures has been coupled with increased investments in livestock by Soninke families to store the wealth generated by remittances of family members in France.

  5. Some of these movements have been due to increased movements south by Mauritanians and the expulsion of FulBe pastoralists from Mauritania (Santoir 1990; Ciavolella 2014).

  6. In Senegal, the first- (largest) through fourth- (smallest) order administrative districts are the région (1st), département (2nd), arrondissement (3rd) and commune (4th). These initial meetings began at the arrondissement level and later it proved more effective to gain this information at the level of the commune.

  7. For regressions by study zone, adjusted coefficients of determination (adjusted R2s) are 0.19 for River-North (n = 114), 0.22 for North (n = 311), 0.06 for Middle (n = 331) and 0.07 for South (n = 214). All relationships are significant at p < 0.0001.

  8. Please note that these radii are underestimates of the displacement of herds not only because they are the straight-line distance between first and last encampment site (paths are far from straight) but since these distances to not include: 1) The distance covered before reaching the first encampment site; 2) portions of herd movements that fall outside of the study area; and 3) movements within dispersion zones.

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  1. Madison, WI, USA

    Matthew D. Turner, Kramer Gillin, Erin Kitchell & Niwaeli Kimambo

  2. Syracuse, NY, USA

    John G. McPeak

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  1. Matthew D. Turner
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Correspondence to Matthew D. Turner.

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Turner, M.D., McPeak, J.G., Gillin, K. et al. Reconciling Flexibility and Tenure Security for Pastoral Resources: the Geography of Transhumance Networks in Eastern Senegal. Hum Ecol 44, 199–215 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10745-016-9812-2

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