1 Pastoralism within Land Administration: Seasonal Interactions and Access Agreements between Pastoralists and Non-Pastoralists - A Case of Northern Kenya1 Monica Lengoibonia, Paul van der Molena and Arnold K. Bregtb aInternational Institute for Geo-Information Science and Earth Observation (ITC), School of Land administration, Hengelosestraat 99, P.O. Box 6, 7500 AA Enschede, The Netherlands bWageningen University, Laboratory of Geo-Information Science and Remote Sensing, Building 101, Droevendaalsesteeg 3, 6708 PB Wageningen, The Netherlands Abstract Pastoralists in Northern Kenya maintain their seasonal migrations between drylands-highlands resources, and this often result to interactions with non-pastoralist land use actors. The aim of this paper is to understand how non-pastoralist land use actors manage seasonal encounters with migrating pastoralists. A case study was used to find out if non-pastoralist land use actors made agreements to allow herders grazing access on private land; the nature of those agreements; and their opinions on regularization of these access agreements through formalization in Land Administration (LA). Results showed that the majority encountered seasonally migrating pastoralists in distinct drought periods; the majority never allowed herders access on private land; a least proportion allowed access, and made agreements through spoken and written contracts. 1 This article is being submitted to the Journal of Arid Environments.2 Rules formed to regulate pastoralists presence on private land centred on grazing fees, grazing regulations and protection of private property; majority are unwilling to have pastoralists access rights regularized in LA. As land is continuously being adjudicated, surveyed and allocated for private purposes, imposition of statutory rights on pastoralists’ areas, including migration corridors, permanently cuts out and extinguishes pastoralist rights to mobility and access to required resources. This research argues that land adjudication should identify and confer all existing land rights to all its users, in order to avoid obstruction or re-negotiation for access, and concludes by recommending the inclusion of pastoralists’ access rights as real property rights which could be accommodated in LA system. Key words: Land Administration, adjudication, real property rights, pastoralists, non-pastoralist land use actors; access agreements3 Article Outline 1 Introduction..............................................................................................................3 2 Pastoralism, and the expansion of statutory tenures in pastoral areas.....................5 3 Study area and Methods..........................................................................................9 4 Non-Pastoralists and Pastoralists Encounters and Spatiotemporal Agreements....13 4.1 Encounters with migrating pastoralists...........................................................13 4.2 Interaction periods .........................................................................................14 4.3 Access agreements .......................................................................................16 4.4 Views on regularisation of spatiotemporal access in LA.................................20 4.5 Pastoralists’ support, views on maintained mobility and resultant conflicts.....21 5 Discussions...........................................................................................................23 6 Conclusions...........................................................................................................29 7 Acknowledgements ...............................................................................................30 8 Bibliography...........................................................................................................31 1 Introduction Land administration (LA) system is fundamentally about improving tenure security and access to land. The core of a Land Administration (LA) system is the cadastre (Williamson, 2001). “A Cadastre is normally a parcel based, and up-to-date land information system containing a record of interests in land (e.g. rights, restrictions and responsibilities). It usually includes a geometric description of land parcels linked to other records describing the nature of the interests, the ownership or control of those interests, and often the value of the parcel and its improvements. It may be established for fiscal purposes (e.g. valuation and equitable taxation), legal purposes4 (conveyancing), to assist in the management of land and land use (e.g. for planning and other administrative purposes), and enables sustainable development and environmental protection” (FIG, 1995). Cadastral parcels are owned in a variety of tenures, which describe how rights to land are owned (Dale and McLaughlin, 1999). There are processes involved in creating a cadastral parcel. These cadastral processes are boundary survey and adjudication (Molen, 2002). Boundary surveys identify, define, demarcates, measures and maps new or changed parcel boundaries, whereas adjudication establishes the existing rights on land, (FIG, 1995). The boundary of a parcel could comprise of any form, which cadastre 2014 (FIG, 1998) refer to as land object. Definition of parcels is prerequisite for adjudication, whereupon rights and restrictions to be exercised within the parcel are established and with finality (Lawrance, 1985). The rights adjudicated will correspond to with rights to be registered (Lawrance, 1985). These rights are exercised based on four qualities i.e. universality, exclusivity, transferability and enforceability (Tietenberg, 1992). Universality focuses on ownership rights; exclusivity focuses on the rights to benefit from land; transferability focuses on the rights to transfer property rights to another owner; and enforceability provides a structure of penalties that prevent others from encroaching on or taking over property rights without the agreement of the owner (Tietenberg, 1992, Dale and McLaughlin, 1999). All these can be seen as a bundle of rights that are included during adjudication, and it is what the society recognizes as ownership (Freyfogle, 2003, Jacobs, 1998, Penner, 2000). In LA system, however, the adjudication process operates to identify and confer ownership rights, but often isolates/neglects other derived rights which are likely to be