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Agent-Based Modeling of Large-Scale Land Acquisition and Rural Household Dynamics

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GeoComputational Analysis and Modeling of Regional Systems

Part of the book series: Advances in Geographic Information Science ((AGIS))

Abstract

Large-scale land acquisition is a complex policy issue affecting many developing countries. This chapter analyzes how this issue affects rural households using a computational modeling approach. The case study examined is the South Omo Zone in southern Ethiopia, where ongoing large-scale land acquisition transactions generate new dynamics in climate-stressed rural communities living in fragile biophysical environments. The study presents a novel computational model called OMOLAND, a spatial agent-based model explicitly representing key components of South Omo’s rural system (households, enterprises, institutions, climate, and biophysical environment), their coupled interactions, and emergent dynamics. Here we show how humans, especially herders, are separately and jointly affected by environmental change and land acquisition patterns.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the US National Science Foundation through a Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement (NSF-DDRI ) grant (no. 112348), the Office of Naval Research (ONR) under a MURI grant to the GMU-Yale Joint Project on East Africa, and by the Center for Social Complexity at George Mason University. Thanks to the editor and reviewers of an earlier version of this chapter, and to Andrew Crooks, Alan Falconer, and Tim Gulden for comments and discussions. Only the authors are responsible for the content of this paper.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Center for Social Complexity, George Mason University, 4440 University Drive, Fairfax, VA, 22030, USA

    Atesmachew B. Hailegiorgis & Claudio Cioffi-Revilla

Authors
  1. Atesmachew B. Hailegiorgis
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  2. Claudio Cioffi-Revilla
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Correspondence to Atesmachew B. Hailegiorgis .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Geography and Earth Sciences, University of North Carolina at Charlotte, Charlotte, North Carolina, USA

    Jean-Claude Thill

  2. Department of Geography, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada

    Suzana Dragicevic

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Hailegiorgis, A.B., Cioffi-Revilla, C. (2018). Agent-Based Modeling of Large-Scale Land Acquisition and Rural Household Dynamics. In: Thill, JC., Dragicevic, S. (eds) GeoComputational Analysis and Modeling of Regional Systems. Advances in Geographic Information Science. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-59511-5_7

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