Dawn Chatty & Marcus Colchester (Eds

Dawn Chatty & Marcus Colchester (eds.) Conservation and Mobile Indigenous Peoples: Displacement, Forced Settlement and Development, Berghahn Books, New York/Oxford (2002)

THE MURSI AND THE ELEPHANT QUESTION

David Turton

The call for 'community participation' in conservation projects has grown to such an extent over the past few years that it has virtually become current orthodoxy, along with similar calls for participation and 'bottomup' planning and management in rural development projects (IIED, 1994; Pimbert and Pretty, 1995; and numerous references therein). The reasons for this turning away from a 'preservationist' approach, which sees local people as an obstacle to effective natural resource management, are as much biological and economic as they are moral and political. Firstly, since virtually all existing ecosystems are a function of human use and disturbance, artificially to exclude such disturbance runs the risk of reducing biodiversity rather than preserving it (Hobbs and Huenneke, 1992, p. 324, cited by Pimbert and Pretty, 1995, p. 21). Secondly, not only are the technical and logistical costs of attempting to exclude human activity from protected areas very high but such efforts are almost certain to fail. They will alienate the local population from conservation objectives and thus require an everincreasing and, in the longrun, unsustainable level of investment in policing activities.

I shall take the correctness of these arguments for granted, partly because, being neither a biologist nor an economist, I am not qualified to subject them to close analysis and partly because I imagine few would wish to disagree with them. But there is, of course, a huge potential here for wellintentioned rhetoric to take the place of action, or to provide a 'donorfriendly' screen behind which the same old 'preservationist' and ultimately unsuccessful policies are put into practice. The latest plan for the development of the Omo, Mago and Nechisar National Parks, in Southern Ethiopia, is a case in point. The feasibility study for this project, which is now known as the 'Southern National Parks Rehabilitation Project' pays frequent lip service to the need to involve the local people and 'increase the tangible economic benefits' they gain from conservation (Agriconsulting, 1993, p. 61) but, six years later, there has still been no serious effort to achieve either of these objectives.

The issue I shall address in this paper, therefore, is not whether local participation in conservation is in principle 'a good thing', but whether it is feasible and how it might be achieved in the case of the Mursi. This will mean, firstly, giving some baseline information about Mursi natural resource management, without which it is impossible to know to what extent, if at all, present human activity in the area is detrimental to the sustainable use of its renewable resources. Secondly, I shall discuss a number of documents in which foreign advisers and consultants have presented 'top down', or 'preservationist' proposals for conservation in the lower Omo Valley. Thirdly, I shall make some recommendations for a radically different approach, based on the now conventional wisdom of 'conservation with a human face' (Bell, 1987).

MURSI NATURAL RESOURCE MANAGEMENT

The Mursi live in an oblong territory of about 2000 km, bounded to the west and south by the River Omo, to the east by the River Mago and to the north by the River Mara, a seasonal tributary of the Omo (Figure 1). They depend on three main subsistence activities, each of which is insufficient and/or precarious in itself but, when taken together with the other two, makes a vital contribution to the economy: floodretreat cultivation at the Omo, rainfed cultivation in the bushbelt and cattle herding in the wooded grasslands above the 500m contour line. Cultivation is primarily the responsibility of women and cattle herding of men. The main crop is sorghum, though some maize is also grown, together with cow peas, beans and squash. In spanning their three main natural resources (floodland, bushland and grassland), the Mursi have developed a form of transhumance which, although it takes place over a relatively small area, does not permit fixed residence, in a single locality, for any section of the population. Rights to subsistence resources are allocated in a way that reflects the physical and ecological character of the resource and maximises the contribution it makes to the overall viability of the economy.

Floodland is a scarce resource which makes a critical contribution to the economic viability of households but the extent of which varies unpredictably from one year to the next. It must therefore be allocated in such a way that short term adjustments can be made between the amount of land available for cultivation in any one year and the number of potential cultivators. Each Omo cultivation site is associated with a particular clan but it would be very misleading to speak of clans 'owning' land. For a clan is not an organised group but a patrilineal category of the population. Clan names are merely labels, recording the fact that particular stretches of riverbank were first occupied by members of particular clans whose descendants now have prior rights to its use. The effective owners of riverbank land are small groups of close patrilineal kin - descendants of the same grandfather or great grandfather who allocate land to more distant kin and affines, normally for one or two years at a time. Riverbank land, then, is collectively owned by small groups of kin, but many others may have potential or 'diffused' rights in it. The advantage of this system, which clearly depends on obligations to kin being seen as inescapable, is that it maintains a balance between supply and demand where great flexibility is needed to ensure that the maximum benefit is gained from flood cultivation in any one year by the maximum number of individuals. It is not just that flood levels vary from one year to the next but also that the effect of a poor flood will not be uniformly felt at all cultivation sites. Security for individuals and families in these circumstances means having 'dormant' rights in riverbank land at various points along the Omo which can be activated at short notice, and this is what the moral imperatives of kinship and affinity make possible.

Rights to grazing land, on the other hand, are vested in local groups, not kin groups. Here it is necessary to explain that the Mursi are divided into five territorially based groups, or buranyoga (sing. buran), which are named, from north to south, Baruba (formerly known as Mara), Mugjo (formerly known as Mako), Biogolokare, Ariholi and Gongulobibi (Figure 2). Each of these divisions spans the full range of natural resources, from flood land in the east to dry season grazing land in the west. The fact that they make ecological sense presumably accounts for their size and boundedness and for the strong sense of moral obligation which their members feel towards each other (cf. Spencer, 1990, pp. 215-6). They are, in short, miniature replicas and potential equivalents of the Mursi buran as a whole.

Each buran is associated with a particular territory within which its members have 'primary user rights' (Potkanski, 1994, p. 17), but members of other buranyoga are granted temporary rights in the same territory at times of hardship, crisis or emergency. Collective ownership of a resource implies, by definition, that there are rules and conventions determining who shall have access to it, for how long and under what circumstances. As far as grazing land is concerned, these rules apply at the level of the buran. There is a sense in which all Mursi have a right to graze their animals anywhere in Mursiland, but the sense is this: they have a right to be granted access to areas outside their own buran in times of crisis and on a temporary basis. This applies particularly to access to dry season grazing areas in the Elma Valley, the key constraint here, of course, being the availability of permanent water points in the Elma Valley. Since rainfall is highly variable, herders have to be alert to changing conditions on a daily basis and be ready to move their animals at fairly short notice in order to match the available water and grazing to animal numbers in a particular place.

It is often said that pastoralists own grazing land 'collectively' and livestock 'individually' but this distinction, which lies behind Hardin's vastly influential 'Tragedy of the Commons' argument (1968, 1988), is a gross oversimplification. We have just seen that the collective ownership of grazing land amongst the Mursi is compatible with controlled access at the level of the buran. As far as cattle are concerned, it is certainly always possible to identify an individual owner for any particular animal, but so many other people are likely to have actual and potential rights in the same animal that to describe this as individual ownership would be highly misleading because it would imply that the 'owner' could use and dispose of the animal entirely as he or she saw fit. It would be more accurate to describe cattle as owned collectively, small groups of patrilineally related men - essentially groups of brothers - having primary 'user rights' in them. This does not mean that brothers always live together and herd their cattle as a single unit. On the contrary, a man is more likely to be found sharing a settlement with his affines than with his patrilineal kin. It does mean that brothers have potential or 'dormant' rights in each other's cattle which they can activate at any time, but especially in extreme circumstances. The diffusion of rights in livestock to a wide variety of kin, affines, and 'stock associates' is a feature of pastoral resource management which has been fully described in the anthropological literature and which is, of course, an effective means of spreading risk and hedging against environmental and other uncertainties. (A particularly notable means of achieving this objective amongst the Mursi is their method of collecting and distributing bridewealth cattle (Turton, 1980)). It is worth pointing out that the system for allocating rights in riverbank land, another scarce, critical and highly variable resource, has more in common with that for allocating rights in cattle than it has with that for allocating rights in grazing land.

Most East African protected areas and national parks have been created in areas used by pastoralists. One of the main justifications for this has been the 'institutional fact' (Thompson et al. 1986, cited by Warren and Agnew 1988) that pastoralists do not know how to manage the environment in a sustainable way. In particular, their combination of communal ownership of land and individual ownership of cattle locks them into a relentless drive to build up their herds until they exceed the carrying capacity of the range, thus bringing about irreversible environmental degradation the socalled 'Tragedy of the Commons'. Being based on the abstract assumptions of games theory and the concept of the economically rational individual, the argument is elegant and convincing - until one looks at the real world.

Firstly, and as I have already demonstrated briefly for the Mursi, communal access to grazing land does not necessarily equal 'open access'. Or, to put it otherwise, a communal system can control, restrict and coordinate the behaviour of individuals through rules and conventions which they recognise it is in their own best interests to observe (Runge, 1984 and 1986). Secondly, the Tragedy of the Commons argument is based on an 'economic' definition of carrying capacity (the optimal stocking density for commercial ranching) which is considerably lower than the 'ecological' carrying capacity of subsistence herding (Behnke and Scoones, 1993, pp. 38). Thirdly, in the arid and semiarid grazing areas of East Africa, a stable equilibrium between animal and plant populations may never be reached because rainfall and temperature fluctuate so widely that 'it is likely that these non-biological variables will have a greater impact on plant growth than marginal changes in grazing pressure caused by different stocking densities' (Behnke and Scoones, 1993, p.8). And finally, the one certain conclusion to emerge, over the past few years, from the socalled 'overgrazing controversy' (Homewood and Rodgers, 1987) is that the subject is so beset with conceptual confusion and so much in need of more objective methods of assessment and evaluation that great care should be taken before making any assertions about individual cases in advance of a careful study of the evidence (e.g. Warren and Agnew, 1988; Abel and Blaikie, 1990; Tapson, 1993; Homewood and Rodgers, 1987 and 1 9 9 1 ) .

I am not qualified to make such a study of the Mursi case. I can only report that there is no obvious evidence that their pastoral activities are, in the words of one recent definition of range degradation, bringing about 'an effectively permanent decline in the rate at which land yield's livestock products' (Abel and Blaikie, 1989, p. 113). The same can also be said, mutatis mutandis, of flood retreat cultivation, although the case of rainfed cultivation, because it depends on clearing new areas of bush every few years, is more problematic. Even if it is accepted, however, that the natural resource management system of the Mursi has the capacity to 'maintain those features of the natural environment which are essential to its continued wellbeing' (Behnke and Scoones, 1993, p. 20), there is always the danger that the cooperative norms upon which its smooth and efficient running depends will break down under pressures brought about by economic change and state incorporation.

The greatest threat to the efficient management of natural resources by African

pastoralists has come not from contradictions internal to the ecology of subsistence herding, as the 'Tragedy of the Commons' argument would have us believe, but from external pressures. Not the least important of these have resulted from wellintentioned but misguided livestock development projects (Horowitz, 1986; Galaty and Bonte, 1991; DysonHudson, 1991). The loss of key dryseason pastures, whether to agriculturalists or wildlife conservation schemes, has had a particularly disastrous impact on pastoralists. For the Mursi, the threat to these 'key pastures in wetter areas' comes from the potential development of the Omo and Mago National Parks.