Comments on "Comparative study of pastoral property regimes in Africa offers no support for economic defensibility model"

Addison, Jane

Abstract

[Excerpt] Using case studies from East and West Africa, Moritz et al.test the ability of resource defense theory to predict open and common property institutional systems. They skillfully combine a qualitatively coded data set of institutional contexts with quantitative biophysical data to test a series of theoretically grounded hypotheses. These include (i) Do resource variability and density predict whether an institutional system is likely to be open or common property? and (ii) Do encapsulation, the level of involvement of the state in everyday rangeland management, and circumscription, the degree to which rangeland management is restricted due to the presence of neighboring groups, do likewise? They conclude that while resource variability, density, and encapsulation in general do not predict institutional systems, circumscription strongly predicts whether an institutional context will be open or common property.

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Current Anthropology

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1537-5382

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University of Chicago Press

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DOI

10.1086/705240