Resource management under climatic risk: a case study from Niger.

I. INTRODUCTION

Rainfall variation is oftentimes identified as the major risk faced through agro-pastoralists in the arid and semi-arid regions of sub-Saharan Africa [Swallow, 1994] In these environments, households must adopt mechanisms to manage the variability in production of harvests and livestock, and to mitigate the impacts of dryness when it does occur. Among the many risk management strategies that have been identified, livestock mobility is many times seen as one of the greatest in quantity valuable, since it enables herders to improve mean output as well as decrease output fluctuations associated