Nothing in what follows argues against the latest East Africa drought being of catastrophic proportions in terms of human and livestock deaths and migrations. What I want to do here is contextualize this catastrophe differently in order to show what remains a catastrophe has some different but very important policy and management implications.
I
Start with the current debates over periodizing World Wars I and II. It’s one thing to adopt the conventional periodization of the latter as 1939 – 1945. It is another thing to read in detail how 1931 – 1953 was a protracted period of conflicts and wars unfolding to and from a central paroxysm in Europe.
In the latter perspective, the December 1941 – September 1945 paroxysm, with the Shoah and the carnage, was short and embedded in a much longer series of large regional wars. These in turn were less preludes to each other than an unfolding process that was indeed worldwide. (Think: Japan’s invasion of Manchuria in 1931, Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia in 1935, the late 1940s Dutch war in Indonesia, the French war in Indochina from the late 1940s through early 1950s, and the Korean War, among regional conflicts across the globe.)
II
Now think of the latest East Africa drought as one such paroxysm, with drought-related conflicts leading up to and following from it. What follows from such a construction?
Well, one thing that follows is so obvious that it might be missed. This East Africa drought is not a paroxysm for pastoralism systems worldwide, let alone in the world’s arid and semi-arid lands.
Even the current climate emergency would fall short of that role, given so much regional and local variation in climate response to date. Of course, we can imagine a global polycrisis involving drought, climate change and the like, but that scenario would inevitably be but one of other potential polycrisis scenarios out there.
III
So, let’s return to East Africa as the unit and level of analysis, with the current drought being an indisputable paroxysm.
What follows for policy and management there?
Current emergency management lingo about this or that “longer-term recovery” would be considerably problematized when the longer term is one drought unfolding into another drought and so on. Immediate emergency response would look considerably less immediate when embedded in a process of recurring response always before the next disaster.
To be clear here, it’s an advance in pastoralist development to embed mechanisms for explicit emergency preparedness, immediate response and longer term recovery. But no one should delude themselves into believing that making explicit these stages and identifying interventions won’t highlight the ongoing and unfolding difficulties in recasting these processes in terms that policy or management narratives with beginnings, middles and ends.
IV
What does this mean practically?
What does it mean to frame the current East Africa drought as a paroxysm that extends both the spatial and temporal terms of “recurring drought response and recovery across East Africa”?
Clearly then one major issue is government budgets (in the plural) for their recurrent operations in pastoralist areas. Or more negatively, you’re looking at the recurrent cost crises of East Africa governments–which, to my mind, far too few critics analyze as they seem more fixated on the obvious failures of capital development projects and programs for pastoralists.
My own view (and I stand to be created) is that you have to have recurrent operating budget already in place in order to get recurring drought response and recovery more effective on the ground over time.
V
Anything else?
One of the major reasons why “recurring drought response and recovery” is better part of government’s recurrent rather than capital budget is because pastoralists give ongoing priority to the real-time prevention of other disasters from happening along the way and the need for their improvisational behavior to do that.
Yes, the government budget for staff operations falls woefully short in helping pastoralists do so, but it is government operations we are talking about, not the log-frame of a project.
Source
Buchanan, A. (2023). Globalizing the Second World War. Past & Present: A Journal of Historical Studies 258: 246-281.
WHEN COMPLEX IS AS SIMPLE AS IT GETS 