50 years of research on pastoralism & development

The Institute of Development Studies (IDS) in the UK has issued a collection of IDS Bulletin articles that reflects on 50 years of research on pastoralism at IDS. The “end of pastoralism” was proclaimed widely in the 1970s, yet pastoralism has survived as a successful, resilient livelihood adapted to some of the harshest environments on the planet. It remains an important livelihood for many.

The IDS Bulletin Vol. 51 No. 1A (2020) Fifty Years of Research on Pastoralism and Development brings 13 articles on pastoralism published between 1986 and 2017. The articles address six overlapping themes: pastoral livelihoods; institutions and common property resource management; climate change and ecological dynamics; food security, early warning, and livelihood vulnerability; pastoral marketing; and conflict and governance. Across these themes, IDS research has challenged mainstream development thinking and practice, highlighting the importance of mobility and living with uncertainty. Research has also challenged the standard models derived from settled systems, and emphasised flexibility, opportunism and improvisation as responses to uncertainty.

Five of the articles refer specifically to Eastern Africa:

1. Local customary institutions as a basis for natural resource management among Boran pastoralists in northern Kenya by Jeremy Swift (1991, 4pp, re-published 2020). Policies for natural resource management (NRM) and conservation often depend on new types of institution for their implementation, although the record of such innovation is poor. Research among the pastoral Boran of northern Kenya shows that customary institutions effectively manage many aspects of natural resource use, and could provide the starting point for new NRM policies.
2. Communities, commodities and crazy ideas: changing livestock policies in Africa by Andy Catley et al (2005, 7pp, re-published 2020). In the 1990s, most livestock projects were based on technology transfer and had no sustained impact on the poor. A second type of project then evolved, aiming to strengthen the capacity of government organisations to develop and deliver novel technologies and services to the poor. In mot cases, sustained benefits for the poor were limited. New skills did not change how organisations behaved; the institutional framework rarely provided incentives to address the specific needs of the poor. However, a few projects that showed good impact included new approaches to primary animal health care using private community-based animal health workers (CAHWs). Yet also these projects faced problems at policy and institutional level: veterinary policies and legislation did not support CAHWs and were often vague or not implemented. This article describes how workers at the African Union Inter-African Bureau for Animal Resources (AU-IBAR) addressed policy constraints to CAHW services in the Horn and East Africa.
3. Youth participation in smallholder livestock production and marketing by Edna Mutua et al. (2017, 14pp, re-published 2020. This study looked into participation of youth in smallholder livestock production and marketing in Baringo County of Kenya. It focused on how social norms and micro-politics enable or constrain participation of particular groups of young people. It revealed that personal choice, preference for paid over unpaid labour and gender norms in asset access, ownership and control influence smallholder participation in livestock production and trade. This shows a disconnect between Kenya’s youth policy, which advocates for equitable distribution of employment opportunities, and the reality at community level. Interventions that seek to improve livestock production and marketing, particularly involving young people, should adopt strategies that recognise these norms as a first step to addressing social exclusion.
4. Reconstructing political order among the Somalis: the historical record in the south and centre by David Leonard & Mohamed Samantar (2013, 9pp, re-published 2020). The reconstruction of a larger polity in a violence‐torn society such as Somalia requires negotiation of a new social contract between the superordinate body and the local units of governance that have provided citizens some degree of order throughout the conflict. This article shows that the very different trajectories for state‐building in the north and south of the country result in good part from different attention to this generalisation. The founding leaders in Somaliland and Puntland consulted extensively with the assemblies of elders and were able to create civilian constitutional orders. Military leaders in the south and central regions did not incorporate their elders into their political systems. Ultimately, various Islamic movements did build on community‐level governance and used it to successfully challenge the old “warlords”, but most of those allied with the Transitional Federal Government remain weak at the community base.
5. Livestock raiding among the pastoral Turkana of Kenya: redistribution, predation and the links to famine by Dylan Hendrickson et al. (1996, 14pp, re-published 2020). The long‐persisting and erroneous conception of famine among the pastoral Turkana of Kenya as an essentially “drought‐driven” event has given way to growing recognition of the key role which livestock raiding plays in the breakdown of coping strategies. However, this article argues that the phenomenon of cattle raids per se is not the problem. Rather it is the fashion in which raiding has been transformed over the years, from a quasi‐cultural practice with important livelihood‐enhancing functions, into more predatory forms driven by an economic logic and modern forms of violence. This article seeks to understand predatory raiding and its effects in terms of the changing functions that raiding serves in pastoral society and, increasingly, outside it. It uses a model of armed conflict and livelihood vulnerability to illustrate how violence and the threat of violence interact with drought to undermine the coping strategies of herders.

Posted on 29 May 2020 in Pastoralism & Marketing, Pastoralism & Natural Resources, Pastoralism & Peacebuilding, Pastoralism, Gender & Youth, Pastoralism, Mobility & Land Tenure, Pastoralism, Policy & Power, Pastoralist Livelihoods & Nutrition