The Evolution of Collective Land Tenure Regimes in Pastoralist Societies: Lessons From Andean Countries

Much has been said about the importance of pastoralist livelihoods for the effective and sustainable use of drylands around the world. Yet, pastoralist societies are experiencing more pressures to their way of life than ever before. These pressures and changing trends are jeopardising pastoralist livelihoods as well as the sustainability of dryland resources. In the face of this challenging reality, this paper aims to analyse how land tenure regimes of pastoralist societies living in the Andean altiplano have transformed over the last 50 years. It also discusses the implications of these transformations for the sustainability of resource management in these areas, based on the premise that a better understanding of customary land tenure regimes can help to inform public policy and decision making. There is a tendency amongst traditional pastoralist societies to treat grasslands as common-pool resources which are accessed, used and controlled collectively, usually under open access or communal land tenure regimes. The present analysis is based on the theoretical framework proposed by Schlager and Ostrom (1992) to distinguish between the diverse bundle of rights held by the users of common-pool resources. On this basis, a typology of land tenure regimes has been devised to analyse those present in Andean pastoralist societies. Building on this framework, this study employs a historical institutional analysis method to examine a specific case study: the land tenure regimes in the highlands of Caylloma Province in Arequipa, Peru. First we explain changes to land tenure regimes and the main drivers. Next, we explore the implications of these processes for the sustainability of resource management. Caylloma Province was selected because it has a long history of pastoralist use and it is the subject of previous studies, thereby making it possible to analyse changes in land tenure regimes. Findings show that land tenure regimes in pastoralist societies have changed over time in order to adapt to new environmental, political and economic conditions. In the case of Caylloma Province, the two main external drivers for change have been state intervention and market development. The dynamics of change in land tenure are nonlinear. Despite changes in external conditions some resilient land tenure regimes have persisted over the last 50 years. Specifically, two types of resilient land tenure system have been identified: the Condominium (F/F) and the Communal Condomium (C/F). In both systems, operational level rights are held on a family basis which means that the legitimacy of any pastoralist’s access to land is based on belonging to a family corporate group. Likewise in both systems, collective, choice level rights, pertaining to management, exclusion and alienation issues, rest in the hands of collectives: in the first case (F/F) a familiar corporate group and in the second (C/F) a communal corporate group.