Pastoralists as reliability professionals

The working paper “A new policy narrative for pastoralism? Pastoralists as reliability professionals and pastoralist systems as infrastructure” by Emery Roe (2020, 33pp) proposes that pastoralist systems are better treated, in aggregate, as a global critical infrastructure. The policy and management implications that follow differ importantly from current pastoralist policies and recommendations.

A multi-typology framework is presented, identifying the conditions under which pastoralists can be considered real-time reliability professionals in systems with mandates preventing or otherwise avoiding key events from happening. The framework leads to a different policy-relevant counter-narrative to pastoralism as generally understood today. Some features of the counter-narrative are already known or have been researched. The paper’s aim is to provoke further work (including case research and interactions with decision-makers) on how robust the counter-narrative is as a policy narrative for recasting today’s pastoralist policy and management interventions.

The paper was written as part of the PASTRES (Pastoralism, Uncertainty & Resilience: Global Lessons from the Margins) project supported by an Advanced Grant from the European Research Council (ERC).

The author also wrote “Pastoralists as reliability professionals” (17 April 2020) as a blog based on this working paper.

Posted on 26 May 2020 in Pastoralism & Natural Resources, Pastoralism, Policy & Power, Value of Pastoralism