Dr. Esther Mwangi :: Sustainability Science Program :: Center for International Development

Sustainability Science Program

Dr. Esther Mwangi
Center for International Development
Kennedy School of Government
Harvard University
503 Rubenstein Building
79 JFK Street
Cambridge, MA 02138 USA
Tel: (1) 617-384-5737
Fax: (1) 617-496-8753
Email: esther_mwangi "at" ksg.harvard.edu
Group affiliation: 2008-9 Giorgio Ruffolo Post-doctoral Fellow in Sustainability Science

Esther Mwangi is a Giorgio Ruffolo Post-doctoral Fellow in Sustainability Science in the Sustainability Science Program at Harvard's Center for International Development and a Ziff Environmental Fellow at the Harvard University Center for the Environment. She will explore the dynamic interaction between property rights, rangeland sustainability and pastoral livelihoods in the Kajiado District of Southwestern Kenya. She has a PhD in Public Policy from Indiana University in 2003 and is co-winner of the 2005 Harold D. Laswell Award for the best Doctoral dissertation in Policy Studies. Her research interests include the conditions under which institutions may enhance natural resource management and improve local livelihoods, gender, land rights, and strategies for linking research knowledge to policy and practice. Esther was a postdoctoral fellow with the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), working specifically with the CGIAR System-Wide program on Collective Action and Property Rights (CAPRi), where she coordinated a global research project examining the role of collective action and property rights for poverty reduction in East Africa and Asia. Recent publications include Collective Action and Property Rights for Poverty Reduction: A Review of Methods and Approaches (with Markelova, CAPRI, 2008); Socioeconomic Change and Landuse in Africa: The Transformation of Property Rights in Kenya's Maasailand (Palgrave MacMillan, 2007); Prosopis juliflora and local livelihoods (with Swallow, Conservation and Society, 2008); and A Century of institutions and ecology in East Africa's rangelands (with Ostrom, Springer-Verlag, 2008). Her faculty hosts at Harvard are Pauline Peters, Calestous Juma, and William Clark.

The Commons in Transition: Looking Back, Thinking Ahead for Environmental and Livelihoods Sustainability: Little empirical research has been done on the implications of different property rights regimes for environmental sustainability in lands of marginal and varying productivity. This study will use multiple methodologies to explore the effects of increasing range privatization on vegetation cover and distribution in the Maasai rangelands of Kajiado district in southwestern Kenya. The Maasai rangelands, where property rights have changed from various scales of collective holdings to individual, titled parcels over a time span of four decades, provide a unique case for studying the dynamic interactions between property rights institutions and environmental condition. The research also tries to establish the institutional basis for the reconsolidation of individual parcels (an emergent post-individualization strategy) among herders and its effects on land management and livelihoods. The research will contribute to longstanding debates on critical elements of property rights structures for areas of low and variable productivity, while providing some input into the ongoing search for sustainability indicators.