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PR, IFPRI2; CAPRi, EPTD, This chapter presents a conceptual framework for examining how formal and informal institutions of property rights and collective action can contribute to poverty reduction, including through external interventions and action by poor people themselves. The past two decades have witnessed an increased understanding of the role of institutions in natural resource management (Ostrom 1990; Baland and Platteau 1996). The insights on the role of formal and informal property rights and collective action institutions in improving well-being can assist both research and policies for poverty reduction. They shed light on issues of governance, power relations, and ideological factors that keep people in poverty.

PR, IFPRI2; CAPRi, EPTD, This chapter explores these dynamics in the pastoralist commons of eastern Ethiopia. We study current practices of managing water and pasture resources of pastoralist and agropastoralist groups at three sites in Somali Region, Ethiopia. We investigate how changing property rights regimes affect incentives to participate in collective action. Our studies suggest that in the process of unmaking the commons, benefit streams to significant water and pasture resources are individualized, whereas social duties to manage communal resources through collective action are externalized. Such patterns disturb customary practices of reciprocal resource-sharing arrangements, which in the past have been instrumental in managing risk in pastoralist livelihoods and unraveling intraclan social obligations that have helped the poor. With regard to the conceptual framework presented in Chapter 2, this study illustrates how relationships between elements of the initial context and the action arena can lead to the emergence of patterns of interaction that have negative implications for the well-being of people, especially poorer, less powerful individuals in society.

"It is often argued that environmental scarcity was a trigger and source of violent conflict, in particular in African countries. At the root of such arguments is a simple environmental determinism, which understands scarcity as undermining co-operative relationships between competing resource users. Robert Kaplan popularised this thesis in his argument about 'The Coming Anarchy', where he interpreted recent civil wars in Africa as an advent of a fundamental environmental crisis. In our view, this conception disregards the crucial role of local-level institutions in governing competing resource claims. In this paper, we present a case study from the violence-prone Somali Region, Ethiopia. We analyse how agro-pastoralist communities develop sharing arrangements on pasture resources with intruding pastoralist communities in drought years, even though this places additional pressure on their grazing resource. A household survey investigates the determinants for different households in the agro-pastoralist community, asset-poor and wealthy ones, to enter into different types of sharing arrangements. Our findings suggest that resource sharing offers asset-poor households opportunities to stabilise and enhance their asset-base in drought years, providing incentives for co-operative rather than conflictive relations with intruding pastoralists. We conclude that it may depend on potential incentives arising from institutional arrangements, whether competing resource claims in periods of environmental scarcity are resolved peacefully or violently." (author's abstract)

"In the light of a growing number of unstabilized regions of warfare or post-war conditions, this paper investigates how civilians survive in the context of a civil war. It analyzes livelihood strategies of farmers in the war-torn areas of Sri Lanka. The analytical framework is based on a revised form of DFID's sustainable rural livelihoods approach placing particular attention on the institutional reproduction of household capital assets in the war economy. The paper delineates a three pillar model of household livelihood strategies focusing on how households (i) cope with the increased level of risk and uncertainty, (ii) adjust their economic and social household assets for economic survival, and how they (iii) use their social and political assets as livelihood strategies. Empirically, the paper analyses four local case studies from the east of Sri Lanka. A key conclusion from the empirical studies was that even though the four case studies were located geographically very close, their livelihood outcomes differed considerably depending on the very specific local political geography. The role of social and political assets is thereby essential: While social assets (extended family networks) were important to absorb migrants, political assets (alliances with power holders) were instrumental in enabling individuals, households or economic actors to stabilize or even expand their livelihood options and opportunities. Hence, civilians are not all victims, some may also be culprits in the political economy of warfare. From a perspective of war-winners and losers, war can be both, a threat and an opportunity, often at the same time." (author's abstract), Mit einem Blick auf die wachsende Anzahl von instabilen Regionen, in denen Krieg geführt wird bzw. die sich in einer Nachkriegssituation befinden, untersucht der Beitrag die Überlebensweisen der Zivilbevölkerung im Kontext des Bürgerkrieges in Sri Lanka. Dabei gilt das Hauptaugenmerk den Lebenserhaltungsstrategien der Bauern in den kriegszerstörten Gebieten im Osten des Landes. Den analytischen Rahmen der Studie bildet ein Ansatz zu nachhaltigen ländlichen Existenzgrundlagen mit dem Schwerpunkt der institutionellen Vermehrung von Haushaltskapitalwerten in der Kriegswirtschaft. Es wird ein Drei-Säulen-Modell zu Lebenserhaltungsstrategien von Haushalten herangezogen, das die folgenden Aspekte thematisiert: (1) den Umgang mit der gestiegenen Ungewissheit und Risiko, (2) die Regulierung der ökonomischen und sozialen Potenziale für das wirtschaftliche Überleben sowie (3) die Nutzung der sozialen und politischen Möglichkeiten im Rahmen der Überlebensstrategien. Der Untersuchungsraum erstreckt sich über vier Orte im Distrikt Trincomalee in der Nordostprovinz von Sri Lanka. Ein wichtiges Ergebnis der empirischen Studie bildet die Beobachtung, dass die vier Orte trotz ihrer geografischen Nähe deutliche Unterschiede bei den Überlebensstrategien offenbaren, was auf die differenzierten lokalpolitischen Ausrichtungen zurückzuführen ist. Die Rolle der sozialen und politischen Werte ist demnach essentiell: während das soziale Potenzial der ausgedehnten Familiennetzwerke dem Auffangen von Migranten dient, beschert das politische Potenzial Individuen, Haushalten oder wirtschaftlichen Akteuren die Stabilisierung bzw. Vergrößerung ihrer Optionen und Gelegenheiten der Existenzsicherung. Ferner sind nicht alle Zivilisten als Opfer einzustufen, manche präsentieren sich vielmehr als Mittäter bzw. Profiteure der politischen Kriegswirtschaft. Aus der Perspektive der Kriegsgewinner und -verlierer ist der Krieg somit sowohl als Bedrohung als auch als Chance anzusehen. (ICGÜbers)

Development is not thinkable without a functioning state. Many postcolonial societies, especially in sub-Saharan Africa and Central Asia, experience processes of a disintegrating state that fails to deliver development and security. In its most extreme case, such state failure can lead to complete state collapse, coupled with civil war and protracted violent conflict. In the Western discourses of development, state collapse is often seen as exemplified in so-called new wars that are based on warlordism and bush economies. In this sense, state collapse is an imagined geographical space of the [`]other' of development, progress, and security, a failure of modernity. However, state failure and collapse are integrated in processes of economic globalization. Explanations of state failure and state collapse therefore emphasize internal and external factors. Functionalist arguments focus on the social, economic, and political functions of a state and explain the failure to deliver these with the crumbling authoritarianism, neopatrimonialism of postcolonial elites, and the emergence of global nonformal economic networks of resource appropriation. In response to these new challenges, donor discourses focus on how humanitarian aid and development assistance can be delivered in such complex emergencies. With the advent of 11 September 2001 and the global terrorism discourse, development and security have become intertwined in the doctrine of rebuilding the state in war-torn societies.

Economists have developed a number of theories based on warlord or bandit models to explain intra-state conflict and civil war. These models assume rational agents that agitate in a kind of institutional vacuum. This view is flawed. Ethnographic studies from civil wars suggest that livelihoods and institutions in the context of a war economy are very complex, more complex than those models suggest. We do not find an institutional vacuum – or anarchy – but a hybrid set of overlapping and contradictory sets of rules. This paper applies several concepts of institutions discussed in literature on new institutional economics and sociology to an analysis of the emergence and logic of the rules of the game in the political economy of civil wars. The analysis indicates that contracting in civil wars, whether complete or incomplete – and the opportunity to grab (Skaperdas), to loot (Collier) and to exploit others (Hirshleifer) – takes place on many different scales and between different agents, not only among combatants. This creates a complex, dynamic and hybrid institutional amalgam of coercively imposed rules, traditional norms and co-existing formal institutions.

In «Die Erfindung des Politischen» (1993) beschreibt Ulrich Beck Subpolitik als den Ort, an dem die Grenze zwischen Politik und Nichtpolitik verschwindet. Aus der zunehmenden Wirkkraft von Subpolitik erwächst die grundlegende Frage, mit welcher Legitimation diese Art von Subpolitik in die Sphäre der institutionalisierten Politik eindringt. Beck’s Subpolitik soll im Anschluss an theoretische Arbeiten von Chantal Mouffe und Giorgio Agamben als post-politische Aspiration bezeichnet werden, die einen Ausnahmezustand herstellt, indem sie Räume für das Politische postuliert und diese Ausnahmeräume zur Regel erklärt. Dieses Argument wird anhand einer bürokratisierten Form von Subpolitik analysiert, die in der Entwicklungszusammenarbeit (EZA) Eingang gefunden hat: der partizipativen Planungsmethode PRA. Schlüsselwörter: Partizipation, Subpolitik, post-politisch, Ausnahmezustand, Legitimität

Boundaries have always been central to the dynamics of armed conflicts. Wars involve the activation and hardening of certain boundaries, thus dividing friend from foe. But despite the efforts of political potentates to carve out clearly delineated impermeable boundaries, people continue to travel across and sometimes challenge these boundaries. In this article, we study the boundary crossing practices of religious actors in eastern Sri Lanka, a multi-ethnic and multi-religious context affected by protracted war and a tsunami. We discuss two case studies, one on local conflict mediation activities and another on post-tsunami humanitarian work, to examine how religious actors engage with boundaries. We find that paradoxically, religious actors derive their ability to intervene in politically controversial issues because of their perceived distance from the 'dirty' world of politics. But conversely their religious and institutional identities are threatened when they become too visibly enmeshed in everyday politics.

Non-PR, IFPRI1; CAPRi, EPTD, Ethiopia experiences a fierce political debate about the appropriate land tenure policy. After the fall of the socialist derg regime in 1991, land property rights have remained vested in the state and only usufruct rights have been alienated to farmers – to the disappointment of international donor agencies. This has nurtured an antagonistic debate between advocates of the privatization of land property rights to individual plot holders and those supporting the government’s position. This debate, however, fails to account for the diversity and continuities in Ethiopian land tenure systems. This paper reviews the changing bundles of rights farmers have held during various political regimes in Ethiopia, the imperial, the derg and the current one, at different times and places. Our analysis indicates the marked differences in tenure arrangements after the fall of the empire, but identifies some commonalities in land tenure regimes as well, in particular between the traditional rist system and the current tenure system.

Non-PR, IFPRI1; Theme 3; CAPRi, EPTD, This paper presents a conceptual framework on how institutions of property rights and collective action can contribute to poverty reduction, including through external interventions and action by poor people themselves. The first part of the paper examines the initial conditions of poverty, highlighting the role of assets, risks and vulnerability, legal structures and power relations. The latter part investigates the decision-making dynamics of actors-both poor and non-poor-and how they can use the tangible and intangible resources they have to shape their livelihoods and the institutions that govern their lives. The paper concludes with a discussion of how attention to property rights and collective action can improve the understanding of outcomes in terms of changes in wellbeing.

Non-PR, IFPRI1; Theme 3; not on water page; CAPRi, EPTD, In Ethiopian development policies, pastoralist areas have recently attracted more attention. However, much debate and policy advice is still based on assumptions that see a sedentary lifestyle as the desirable development outcome for pastoralist communities. This paper investigates current practices of collective action and how these are affected by changing property rights in the pastoralist and agro-pastoralist economies of three selected sites in eastern Ethiopia. We describe forms of collective action in water and pasture resource management and analyze how changing property rights regimes affect incentives for collective action. We illustrate the distributional effects these practices are having on (agro-) pastoralist communities and how these practices are being influenced by the broader political and economic dynamisms of the area.