Land, Commons and Gender: Collective Land-Use Strategies of Pastoralists in Ethiopia and Austria
Despite the current era of land enclosure and commodification, communities also make up their own rules for creating and maintaining land. They act collectively by establishing broad experience and knowledge in the supervision and sustenance of their ecosystems to ensure ways of sharing uses, benefits and responsibilities. The use of natural resources, including land, always underlies sociocultural gender norms. Pastoralism or “nomadic herding” is a socio-ecological system which tends to follow the logics collective action or “commons-based land use”. In my dissertation, I ask: How does pastoralism as a socio-ecological system nowadays look like? How do pastoralists continue to manage and use land as a commons? What are the gendered dimensions and aspects in commons based- land use systems?
Based on these research questions, the cognitive interest of this research project is the relationship between a natural resource (land) and its users (pastoralists) and the gendered dimensions of this socio-ecological system. Two case study sites have been selected as units of analysis. One is in the Austrian Alps in the federal state Voralberg: Hittisau and the surrounding villages bordering with Germany. The second region is South Omo in Southern Ethiopia on the border to Kenya and South Sudan, specifically Kangaten and the surrounding villages. Theoretically, this project understands itself as an interdisciplinary bridge-building endeavor of commons research and gender studies.