Revival of the drylands & pastoral livelihoods in Eastern Africa

In the article “The revival of the drylands: re-learning resilience to climate change from pastoral livelihoods in East Africa” (Climate and Development 2023, https://doi.org/10.1080/17565529.2022.2160197), Greta Semplici and Tom Campbell review different waves of rural politics and development in the East African drylands, with a focus on Kenya’s arid and semi-arid lands, in the context of climate change. They question the re-awakening of international and national attention paid to the drylands under the all-embracing framework of “resilience building”. Tensions between climate-change policies and local knowledge and practices remain. Such renewed attention retains old myths about drylands and leaves little space to the agency of pastoral communities that live in these territories or to examining the implications of misled development efforts.

The authors point out that what largely inhibits pastoral livelihoods are non-climate stressors: the overlapping and diversified agendas of the wider sociopolitical and economic environment, including the pervasive hands of colonialism in the new face of capitalistic penetration of the drylands. These stressors work as a constraint for the effective process-variance practices put in place by pastoral communities to tackle the variability of their surroundings. An enabling institutional environment should be established and coordinated to remove obstacles to pastoral production and access to resources.

Posted on 15 March 2023 in Pastoralism & Climate Change, Pastoralism, Policy & Power