Thirteenth International Conference on Climate Change: Impacts & Responses

Abstract

In West Africa, sedentary crop farmers (farmers) and pastoral herders (herders) have coexisted for many centuries. However, in the past two decades, conflicts between these two groups keep rising steadily across the subregion, in sharp contrast to the symbiotic relationship that farmers and herders had enjoyed. This project a) probes the conflict dynamics across West Africa in terms of their setting and intensity. It engages the literature on the climate and conflict nexus to propose theoretical mechanisms underpinning the clashes and used empirical qualitative evidence from a sample of 40 detailed interviews conducted in the hotspots in Ghana to explicate these clashes. First, it argues that farmer-herder tensions are resource conflicts, a factor ignored by prior studies. Second, it probes how common pool resource-use (C.P.R) regimes regulate and alter the conflict processes. The study describes how rangelands and small water management practices interact with resource use and evaluate the implications of different user stratifications on the conflicts. The analysis focus on the effects of climate change, focusing on changes in resource availability, contrasting cases of abundance, and scarcity.