Recasting tenure and labour in non-equilibrium environments: Making the case for “high-reliability” pastoral institutions

This paper explores how pastoralists collectively manage resources in contexts of high environmental variability in the drylands of southern Tunisia. The khlata, the practice of pooling herds, allows for livestock owners to manage scarce resources in environments characterized by non-equilibrium dynamics. This institution legitimizes access to a wider range of pasture land thus tracking patchy rainfall distribution, and allows for the sharing of herding labour and so allows for “absence” in pastoral production, thus enabling human mobility. The khlata, recasts conceptualizations of tenure and labour in ways that subvert neoliberal models of production, and adapt to changing political economic conditions. Such collective herding practices can be likened to “high-reliability” management ideas that accommodate the social and networked dimensions of land-use in drylands, where coordination and connectivity through institutions becomes crucial. The theoretical approach includes pastoral perspectives on tenure, where rules are not well defined and membership is fluid, contributing to a different take on conventional common-property debates and neoliberal views on property, and indeed institutions. When pastoral production is framed as a high-reliability system, the objective of maintaining security and at the same time flexibility in land tenure is emphasised: livestock owners make use of a wide range of scale-dependent resources, whether public, private, or common property. Land-use policy should therefore focus not on rules and regulations but how to support institutions that maintain a highly-reliable system within contexts of fuzzy tenure regimes. Land-use policy should therefore focus on coordinating connectivity through collective arrangements by prioritizing the “informal” and adaptive nature of institutions such as the khlata, rather than focusing on their formalization. Overall, the paper shows how the khlata redefines access to land and labour in ways that create additional options for pastoralists to adapt to changing political economic conditions in southern Tunisia.