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Abstract:
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"The sahelian zone of Burkina Faso was traditionally characterized as being overwhelmingly geared towards livestock production heavily reliant on mobility. However, with the process of sedentarization of the population, the region is more accurately depicted as agro-pastoral population, though livestock products still comprise the largest share in combined value of cash income and home consumption. Nevertheless, most pastoral land is still 'owned' in common, which means that the success of provision and management of most natural resources relies on cooperation between villagers. This cooperation can be informal or established formally through rules and activities by institutions dealing with natural resources management (NRM). Given this environment, our goal in this paper is twofold: first, to determine the external and internal factors influencing the way NRMs institutions work and second, how this affects the level of the resource use, observed in this study through stock densities and land allocation. Using data collected in 2000 in 48 villages of Oudalan and Seno provinces, our preliminary results show that structure, conduct and performance of NRMs institutions are quite correlated with many external (projects/NGOs presence, external users of pastoral zone) and internal (population, heterogeneity, alphabetization) village characteristics. In addition, our conclusion confirms empirical observation that population pressure leads both to higher stock densities and a greater share of land allocated to crops. Furthermore, in communities with a relatively high degree of non-cooperation - proxied by an index developed from information on the conduct and performance of NRM institutions - both stock levels and land allocated to crops are higher."
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