Transhumant Pastoralism, Climate Change, and Conflict in Africa

Eoin McGuirk and Nathan Nunn

No 28243, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: We consider the effects of climate change on seasonally migrant populations that herd livestock – i.e., transhumant pastoralists – in Africa. Traditionally, transhumant pastoralists benefit from a cooperative relationship with sedentary agriculturalists whereby arable land is used for crop farming in the wet season and animal grazing in the dry season. Droughts can disrupt this arrangement by inducing pastoral groups to migrate to agricultural lands before the harvest, causing conflict to emerge. We examine this hypothesis by combining ethnographic information on the traditional locations of transhumant pastoralists and sedentary agriculturalists with high-resolution data on the location and timing of rainfall and violent conflict events in Africa from 1989–2018. We show that droughts in the territory of transhumant pastoralists lead to conflict in neighboring areas. Consistent with the hypothesis, these conflict events are concentrated in agricultural areas; they occur during the wet season and not the dry season; and they are due to rainfall’s impact on plant biomass growth. This mechanism explains a sizable proportion of conflict events in Africa, particularly civil conflicts and religious-extremist attacks. We find that the effects are muted in the presence of irrigation aid projects, but not in the presence of other forms of foreign aid. The effects approach zero as pastoral groups share more political power.

JEL-codes: N10 Q54 Z1 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020-12
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-afr, nep-agr, nep-env, nep-evo, nep-gro and nep-his
Note: DAE DEV EFG ITI POL
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (29)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w28243.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nbr:nberwo:28243

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w28243

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().