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Literature on the mobility of pastoralists and resource access is widely available, but conceptualization and understanding of the socioeconomic processes expected to affect the outcome are inconsistent. In this article, drawing on research conducted in the Yerer and Daketa Valleys, eastern Ethiopia, we use the notion of entitlements to examine how, under increasing pressure for resource access, various agro-pastoral households manage conflicting interests in common grazing resources. We observed that in times of drought and resource scarcity incumbent agro-pastoralists find peaceful sharing arrangements with intruding pastoralists. Asset-poor agro-pastoralists enter into mutually beneficial arrangements with pastoralists, trading their resource endowments to grazing land for other assets from the pastoralists, whereas wealthier households prefer a reciprocal risk-management strategy. These multiple arrangements have distributional effects because asset-poor agro-pastoralist households can stabilize or enhance their household assets and their capabilities in times of drought, and thus benefit from assisting pastoralist migrants to the common grazing land.
