Carolyn Lesorogol (right) and a Samburu girl in a Kenyan livestock herding community

My primary research interests concern understanding the political economy of processes of institutional change. Specifically, how and why do the social norms and rules that shape important elements of social life transform over time, and how do particular changes in rules and norms affect livelihoods and social relations among members of a community? I have been pursuing this line of inquiry among the Samburu, a livestock herding people who live in north-central Kenya, since 2000, following a decade of community development work I had done there in the 1990s. To study institutional change, I have focused on one set of critically important institutions: property rights over land. Property rights determine access to and rights over land — a primary livelihood resource — among members of a community.

My dissertation research investigated a case in which one community of Samburu people privatized their communally managed land into equally sized parcels for each resident household. This dramatic shift in property rights, I found, was the outcome of a long conflict between two groups in the community, one that favored privatization and one that opposed it. Each side deployed their political, economic, and moral resources to influence the course of change. In the end, a compromise solution of equal-sized parcels for each household was brokered among the community members, a prominent local leader, and the government authorities. Using household survey data and a comparative case study approach, I also found that the shift from communal to private property did not destroy livestock production as some scholars assumed and that the increase in cultivation following privatization enabled people in the privatized area to diversify their livelihoods, providing an additional hedge against risk. This work was recently published in my book, Contesting the Commons: Privatizing Pastoral Lands in Kenya (2008, University of Michigan Press).

My recent work continues to examine institutional change, and I have conducted a study of the newly emerging system of land inheritance in the area where land was privatized. This is an interesting case of institutional innovation since, prior to privatization, there was no concept of land inheritance. While no single rule of inheritance has yet been adopted, practices of primogeniture that are found in livestock inheritance appear most likely to prevail for land also. However, the different character of land versus livestock portends ongoing intrafamilial conflicts as younger sons lose out to elder brothers in this system.

Currently I am working on a project that combines anthropological methods and computer simulation modeling to understand the linkages among household land use and grazing decisionmaking with ecological conditions at the landscape level. Colleagues from Colorado State University and I are using my longitudinal household data and ecological data to create linked models of households and the environment to determine how newly emerging grazing rules in the privatized community are reflected in patterns of livestock movement and allocation of land to crops and livestock uses. The results of this work have practical applications for members of this community, as well as policymakers, as we can model the broader effects of individual household decisionmaking.

Carolyn Lesorogol, PhD 2002, is on the faculty of Washington University as an associate professor of social work at the George Warren Brown School of Social Work and an adjunct associate professor of anthropology in Arts & Sciences.