The Vision is enunciated without explanation.

When broken down into its constitutive elements, this vision is about envisaged features of the ‘pastoralist community’:

• resilient to disasters (both man-made and natural);
• with improved and sustainable livelihood, environment, and institutions;
• where democracy and good governance are ensured;
• where peaceful and inclusive development is realized.

COMMENTARY

Resilience to disasters. The first element of the vision is of particular interest, as it presents exposure to man-made and natural disasters as a weakness of pastoralist communities. The vision is that these communities will overcome such weakness and become more resilient in the future. But is being exposed to disasters a feature of pastoralist communities, or rather a condition that has been created for them? The policy openly acknowledges a legacy of mistakes in pastoral development, ranging from neglect (not doing the right things) to ill-informed interventions (doing the wrong things), thus ignoring pastoralist voices and actually causing problems. Current problems in pastoral areas are openly attributed to such a past: pastoralists’ livelihoods, based on animal husbandry, have been ‘undermined severely’ (p.71); their customary knowledge and institutions have been overlooked and weakened (p.75); their key resources have been converted to other uses (pp.22, 76); and the provision of basic services has failed to adapt to local conditions, rendering such services effectively inaccessible to the very communities that they were supposed to reach (pp.33, 39, 51, 56, 67). In this light, exposure to disasters is clearly a condition created by past interventions, not a feature of the pastoralist community.

A vision of pastoral development consistent with the policy’s acknowledgement of past mistakes would take into consideration not only the resilience of pastoralist communities but also the need to change pastoral development, starting from removing obstacles to pastoralists’ resilience that ill-informed development interventions have put in place in the past, leading to the present kinds of vulnerability to disasters. Otherwise, this element of the vision reads as if the first concern of pastoral development consisted in making pastoralists more resilient to the ill-informed changes brought in by development itself.

GENERAL OBJECTIVE: Realizing improved and sustainable livelihoods for people in pastoral areas through integrated development that is centred on the animal resources, local knowledge and other reliable endowments (p.26) »