Five most policy-relevant entries on pastoralists and pastoralisms

1. When interconnections are the center of analysis and management: the case of pastoralist systems and interconnected infrastructures upon which they depend

2. Recasting “land-use conflicts” involving pastoralists

3. Disaster averted in central to pastoralist development

4. Recasting national policies for pastoralist developmentBorana sedentarization

5. Assetizing and securitizing pastoralism-as-infrastructure (longer read)

1. When interconnections are the center of analysis and management: the case of pastoralist systems and interconnected infrastructures upon which they depend

I

We know that, when it comes to livestock grazing (and browsing), many herders (and shepherds) depend on water supplies, road transportation, market facilities and telecommunications.

What added purchase then for pastoralist development is to be had when focusing analysis from the very start on the interconnections between herders (broadly writ) and these infrastructures?

The quick answer: When we shift to focusing on the interconnections between their system and the infrastructures pastoralists rely upon, policy and management implications differ considerably compared to the current focus that starts and ends with the pastoralist system instead.

II

By way of an example, the supply of camel milk for marketing may look like a serial sequence from camel to end-consumer, but a closer look reveals important mediated, pooled and reciprocal interconnectivities.

There may be a focal cooperative that mediates collection and other activities in between. Reciprocities (bi-directional interconnectivity) are evident among cooperative members or women sellers along the road when they mutually assist each other. Their milk is pooled at the plant in order to be processed and then marketed. A sense of this mix of sequential, mediated, reciprocal and pooled is capture in Michele Nori’s description of camel milk marketing (CCM) in Isiolo (2023),

Milk produced under these [pastoralist] systems reaches Isiolo through sophisticated supply networks supported by rural collectors and motor-bike transporters (boda boda). These community networks exist and operate in a variety of forms and patterns, and they reconfigure as conditions vary. At the heart of the networks, there are few companies based in Isiolo town, managed by women and characterised by different ethnic configurations, market management and institutional arrangements. A significant number of the women members of the CMM companies are members of camel keeping families. . .We describe now the Isiolo model through the lens of the largest CMM operating company, Anolei. It is quite popular amongst research and development agencies, and we will assess then the other existing networks based on their differences with respect to it. The Anolei cooperative started its activities in the late 1990s (few hundred litres a day) as a self- help women group of (mostly) Garre and Somali women who had recently come to reside in Isiolo (Adjuran and Degodya clans). It was formalised as a cooperative in 2010, also to facilitate access to international support and financing; counts in 2021 found about 90 members, although the figure of active operators changes from one season to another.

https://doi.org/10.1186/s13570-022-00265-1

What’s so important, you ask, about the interconnectivities of milk marketing, e.g., with respect to roads, and their configurations?

The answer is less one of identifying specific or “characteristic” configurations than focusing on the variably and visible shifts as an indicator of significant operational changes, inter-infrastructurally.

III

A different example illuminates the importance of those shifts.

Transhumant herds and herders moving across the borders of adjacent countries have been depicted as real-time herd requirements overlapping with real-time national security concerns. But the focus on sudden shifts–e.g., the relatively recent policy shift of the Uganda government to ensuring Turkana grazers are unarmed when moving from Kenya to better pastures across the border–suggests that there may be a great deal of improvisational behavior–on-site bargaining or context-specific arrangements–going at and across the borders.

Indeed, a major function of these ad hoc, time- and site-specific arrangements (all be they unrecorded) is to bridge, in real time and unofficially, the unavoidable duality of stationary borders and mobile herders in pastoralist policy and management.

IV

So what?

The demand for requisite variety is familiar to experienced infrastructure professionals, including pastoralists: the need to increase real-time options, strategies and resources so as to better match the requirements of unpredictable or uncontrollable conditions.

Requisite variety is the principle that it takes some complexity to manage complexity. If a problem has many variables and can assume a diversity of different conditions or states, it takes a variety of management options to address this complexity. Uncontrollable/unpredicted changes in system inputs have to be transform into a smaller range of managed states.

Having a diversity of resource and strategic options, including being able to assemble, improvise or invent them, is a way to match and manage problem complexity with a variety of capabilities. This is especially important when the improvisations center around overlapping or shared system control variables, such as common grazing lands. Think also of rural people coming together to manage the vehicle transportation of water deliveries because of a sudden worsening in the drought or because, e.g., a major rangeland fire has occurred nearby.

V

But what then are some of the policy and management implications?

For one thing, we shouldn’t be surprised by the huge diversity in organizational and network formats for addressing real-time matches between contingent task demands and contingent capabilities: associations, dedicated government agencies, designated government officers, social movements, catchment areas and planning regions, group ranches and cooperatives, conservancies, coordinators and liaisons, consortia, councils, cross-border committees, NGOs, INGOs, and more. Such diversity is what is to be expected and must be looked for, given the focus on multiple and shifting configurations of interconnectivity.

Nor is it unexpected that a premium is placed on having personal and professional contacts and relationships, since formal and ad hoc structures for organizational and network diversity can only go so far, and not far enough, when it comes to contingent requisite variety. This applies not just to the pastoralists but also to anyone in their networks. A government field officer or headquarters official can also be a mediating, focal player during the disaster and in immediate response thereafter. It is grotesquely misleading to chalk up the latter as “ethnic politics” rather than the search for requisite variety actually underway.

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Other sources

Herbert, S. and I. Birch (2022). Cross-border pastoral mobility and cross-border conflict in Africa –patterns and policy responses. XCEPT Evidence Synthesis. Birmingham, UK: GSDRC, University of Birmingham

Krätli, S, et al (2022). Pastoralism and resilience of food Production in the face of climate change. Background Technical Paper. Bonn: Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ)

Schürmann, A., J. Kleemann, M. Teucher, C. Fürst, and C. Conrad (2022). Migration in West Africa: a visual analysis of motivation, causes, and routes. Ecology and Society 27(3):16

Unks, R., M. Goldman, F. Mialhe, Y. Gunnell, and C. Hemingway (2023). Diffuse land control, shifting pastoralist institutions, and processes of accumulation in southern Kenya, The Journal of Peasant Studies

See also:

“Policy Briefing: Community Solutions to Insecurity along the Uganda-Kenya Border” (https://opendocs.ids.ac.uk/opendocs/bitstream/handle/20.500.12413/18207/IDS_Policy_Briefing_214.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y).

One Step Forward, Two Steps Back: Pastoralist Researchers on the Uganda/Kenya Border (https://opendocs.ids.ac.uk/opendocs/handle/20.500.12413/18123).

2. Recasting “land-use conflicts” involving pastoralists

I

The great virtue of political ecology, in my view, has been to complexify narratives that scarcity-of-this-or-this-sort leads to land-use conflict. I want to suggest that even these more nuanced, multi-causal explanations can be pushed and pulled further.

In particular, I’m not sure that “conflict,” after a point, helps or aids better pastoralist policy and development. In no way should the following be construed as criticism of those writing on land-use conflicts nor is my contribution a justification for killing people. I suggest only that there may be a different way of interpreting what is going on, and if there is, then there may be other ways even better to productively rethink the policy issues involved.

To that end, I use two lenses from the framework in my 2020 STEPS paper.

II

The first is that logic of requisite variety. Complex environments require complex means of adaptation. If inputs are highly variable, so too must be the processes and options to transform this input variability into outputs and outcomes with low and stable variance, in our case, sustained herder livelihoods (or off-take, or herd size, or composition. . .).

One major implication is that “land-use conflict” has to be differentiated from the get-go. By way of example, references to pastoralist raids, skirmishes and flare-ups that do not identify “with-respect-to” what inputs, processes or outputs are bound to be very misleading.

Consider a livestock raid of one pastoralist group on another. It’s part of the input variability of the latter group but it also part of the process options of the former (i.e., when periodic raids are treated as one means over the longer term to respond to unpredictable input shocks, like abrupt herd die-offs). By way of example, some discussion of jihadist raids by young pastoralist men in the Sahel seems to reflect the changing composition and level of variance around the outputs and outcomes (as if there was something like “young-men pastoralism” whose outputs had been changed by or with jihadism).

So what?

It matters for pastoralist policy just what are the process options of the pastoralist group being raided. Do the response options include that of a counter-raid, or to send more household members away from the conflict area, or to form alliances with other threatened groups, or to seek a political accommodation, or to undertake something altogether different or unexpected? For the purposes of policy and management, a livestock raid (or such) is more than a livestock raid.

III

The second lens to refocus land-use conflicts is the entire cycle of infrastructure operations. A livestock raid undertaken by one pastoralist group on another in order to repair or restore its herd numbers/composition differs from the livestock raid undertaken as an immediate emergency response to having the entire system of operations or herd disappear because of some systemwide calamity.

As for those jihadist inspired and supported raids by young pastoralist men, it’s important to determine if those raids are best understood as recovery efforts to a new normal (recovery of a failed system is much more inter-organizationally demanding–think conventional humanitarian aid—than service restoration after a temporary disruption by the system on its own). Much of the current literature on the plight of pastoralists seems as well to be equating recurring pastoralist recoveries after failures as its new normal.

IV

Again: So what?

As with the logic of requisite variety, the whole cycle requires those involved in pastoralist development to first differentiate cases of “land-use conflict” before proposing or adopting policy interventions. It isn’t merely about that old nostrum: Conflict can be productive, not destructive. Rather, “land-use conflicts” are fundamentally different cases of different lands, different uses and different conflicts.

A “conflict” going on for 30 years or more is obviously one that pushes and pulls to center-stage both the full cycle of pastoralist operations across time and the logic of requisite variety at any point in time for transforming input variability into sustained (though over time changing) outputs and outcomes.

3. Disaster-averted is central to pastoralist development

I

My argument is that if crises averted by pastoralists were identified and more differentiated, we’d better understand how far short of a full picture is equating their real time to the chronic crises of inequality, market failure, precarity and such.

To ignore disasters-averted has an analogy with other infrastructure reliability professionals. It is to act as if the lives, assets and millions in wealth saved each day doesn’t matter when real-time control room operators of critical infrastructures prevent disasters from happening that would have happened otherwise. Why? Because we are told that ultimately what matters far more are the infrastructure disasters of modernization, late capitalism, and environmental collapse destructive of everything in their path.

Even where the latter is true, that truth must be pushed further to incorporate the importance of disasters-averted-now. Disaster averted matters to herders precisely because herders actively dread specific disasters, whatever the root causes.

II

Of course, inequality, marketization, commodification, precarity and other related processes matter for pastoralists and others. The same for modernization, late capitalism, global environmental destruction, and the climate emergency. But they matter when differentiated and better specified in terms of their “with respect to.”

Just what is marketization with respect to in your case? Smallstock? Mechanized transportation? Alpine grazing? Is it in terms of migrant herders here rather than there, or with respect to other types of livestock or grazing conditions? How do the broader processes collapsed under “marketization” get redefined by the very different with-respect-to’s?

Most important, appeals to generalized processes or state conditions diminish the centrality of disasters averted through diverse actions of diverse herders. This diminishment leaves us assuming that marketization, commodification, precarity. . .are the chronic crises of real time for herder or farmer. They, we are to assume, take up most of the time that really matters to pastoralists.

But the latter is the case only if the with-respect-to scenarios demonstrate how these broad processes preoccupy real time because herders have failed to avert dreaded events altogether. Without the empirical work showing that no disasters have been averted by pastoralists, the appeal to broad structural explanations begins to look less as a denial of human agency than the idealization of the absence of agency, irrespective of the facts on the ground.

III

Let me give an example. Andrew Barry, British sociologist, reports a finding in his article, “What is an environmental problem?,” from his research in Georgia:

A community liaison officer, working for an oil company, introduced me to a villager who had managed to stop the movement of pipeline construction vehicles near her mountain village in the lesser Caucasus. The construction of the pipeline, she told us in conversation, would prevent her moving livestock between two areas of pastureland. Her protest, which was the first she had ever been involved in, was not recorded in any official or public documents.

Barry found this to be a surprising research event (his terms) and went on to explain at length (internal citations deleted) that

my conversation with the villager pointed to the importance of a localized problem, the impact of the pipeline on her livelihood and that of other villagers, and her consequent direct action, none of which is recorded or made public. This was one of many small, fragmentary indicators that alerted me to the prevalence and significance of direct action by villagers across Georgia in the period of pipeline construction, actions that were generally not accorded significance in published documents, and that were certainly not traceable on the internet. . .At the same time, the mediation of the Georgian company liaison officer who introduced me to the villager was one indicator of the complexity of the relations between the local population, the oil company, and the company’s subcontractors. . .

I believe the phrases, “managed to stop,” “would prevent her moving livestock,” “a localized problem,” “consequent direct action,” “generally not accorded significance,” and “the complexity of the relations” are the core to understanding that disasters-averted remain very real, even if not identified, let alone publicized, by outsiders preoccupied with what hasn’t been averted.

Should it need saying, some with-respect-to scenarios do specify how such phrases result from an ongoing interaction and dialectic between the wider processes and local particularities. I’d hope, though, you’d want to see details behind any such assertion first.

IV

So what? How does the argued importance of disasters-averted compel rethinking pastoralist development? One example will have to suffice: the need to recast “pastoralist elites.”

I recently read a fine piece mentioning today’s Pokot elites and Turkana elders in Kenya. When I was there in the early 1980s, they were neither elderly nor elites all. I’m also pretty sure had I interviewed some of them at that time I’d have considered them “poor pastoralists.”

My question then: Under what conditions do pastoralists, initially poor but today better off, become elites in the negative sense familiar to the critics of elites? The answer is important because an over-arching development aim of the 1980s arid and semi-arid lands programs in Kenya was to assist then-poor pastoralists to become better-off.

My own answer to the preceding question would now focus on the disasters averted over time by pastoralists, both those who are today’s elites and those who aren’t. It seems to me essential to establish if equally (resource-) poor pastoralists nonetheless differentiated themselves over time in terms of how they averted disasters that would have befell them had they not managed the ways they did.

Now, of course, some of the poor pastoralists I met in the early 1980s may have been more advantaged than I realized. Of course, I could have been incorrect in identifying them as “poor pastoralists.” Even so, the refocusing on disasters-averted over time holds for those who were not advantaged then but are so now.

Which leads me to the question that should be obvious to any reader: Since when are researchers to decide that time stops sufficiently in a study period to certify who among herders are advantaged going forward, let alone what are the metrics for determining such? When did the development narrative become “poor herders and farmers must advance at the same rate or even faster than advantaged ones?”

Sources

Barry, A. (2020). What is an environmental problem? In the special issue, “Problematizing the Problematic,” Theory, Culture & Society: 1 – 25.

4. Recasting national policies for pastoralist development

I propose to categorize policies according to their intended goal into a three-fold typology: (i) compensation policies aim to buffer the negative effects of technological change ex-post to cope with the danger of frictional unemployment, (ii) investment policies aim to prepare and upskill workers ex-ante to cope with structural changes at the workplace and to match the skill and task demands of new technologies, [and] (iii) steering policies treat technological change not simply as an exogenous market force and aim to actively steer the pace and direction of technological change by shaping employment, investment, and innovation decisions of firms.

R. Bürgisser (2023), Policy Responses to Technological Change in the Workplace, European
Commission, Seville, JRC130830 (accessed online at https://retobuergisser.com/publication/ecjrc_policy/ECJRC_policy.pdf)

This epigraph focuses specifically on the how to think about policies that better respond to effects of automation on displacing workers.

Please re-read the excerpt and then undertake the following thought experiment.

I

Imagine it is pastoralists who are being displaced from their usual herding workplaces, in this case by land encroachment, sedentarization, climate change, mining, or other largely exogenous factors.

The question becomes what are the compensation, investment and steering policies of government, among others, to address this displacement. That is, where are the policies to: (1) compensate herders for loss of productive livelihoods, (2) upskill herders in the face of eventually losing their current employment, and (3) efforts to steer the herding economies and markets in ways that do not lose out if and where new displacement occurs?

The answer? With the odd exception that proves the rule, no such national policies exist.

II

Yes, of course, there are the NGO, donor project, and local department trying to work along these lines. But one has to ask at this conjuncture in development history whether their existence is the excuse government uses for avoiding having to undertake such policies, regionally or nationally.

III

A more productive exercise might be to ask: How would various existing pro-pastoralist interventions be classified: as compensatory, as investment, and/or as steering?

It seems to me that many of the pro-pastoralist interventions fall under the rubric of “steering policies”. The aim is to keep pastoralists who are already there, there–and better off in some regards. Better veterinary measures, paravets and mobile teachers that travel with the herding households, real-time marketing support, mobile health clinics, restocking programs as and when needed, better water point management and participation, and the like are offered up as ways to improve herding livelihoods in the arid and semi-arid lands.

IV

Fair enough, but not far enough, right? For where are the corresponding compensation and investment policies?

Where, for example, are the policy interventions for improving and capitalizing on re-entry of remittance-sending members back into pastoralism if and when they return home? Where are the national policies to compensate farmers for not encroaching further on pastoralist lands, e.g., by increasing investments on the agricultural land they already have? Where are the national (and international) policies that recognize keeping the ecological footprint of pastoralist systems is far less expensive than that of urban and peri-urban infrastructures?

Or for that matter and more proactively:

1. Start with the EU’s Emission Trading System for CO₂ emission credits. Imagine member/non-member states and companies are now able to enter the ETS to buy credits directed to offsetting GHG emissions in dryland localities committed to transitioning to environmentally friendly production systems and livelihoods based in or around livestock.

2. Start with the European COVID-19 initiative, NextGenerationEU (issuance of joint debt by EU member states to fund pandemic recovery). Imagine employee support schemes under this or some such initiative, with one aim being to augment remittances of resident migrants back to dryland household members and communities.

3. Stay with those resident migrants sending back remittances. Imagine other EU-financed schemes to improve the greening of EU localities heavily resident with migrants (e.g. subsidies to EU residents for more sustainable lifestyles in the EU). Think of this as a form of “reversed green extractivism,” in this case on behalf of dryland households by EU member states for EU-migrant communities.

5. Assetizing pastoralism-as-infrastructure (longer read)

Introduction

Once you start to think of pastoralist systems as complex infrastructures in their own right and globally so, a useful contrast emerges:

While many governments seek to modernize their economies and societies by ridding themselves of longstanding pastoralist systems, global infrastructure equity firms and infrastructure debt funds at the same time are assetizing and securitizing more and more local, regional and national infrastructures for financially stabler returns.

My argument here is that pastoralism-as-infrastructure is better able to resist elements of those latter elements of financialization, precisely because they pastoralist systems are not traditional in the sense of the ruling elites of techno-managers and politicians.

Yes, pastoralists have assets, but assets as resources in pastoralism existed long before capitalism (see Sonenscher 2022). Indeed, assetization as ongoing processes of enclosure and property do not necessarily entail financialization (see McArthur 2023). Nor do commodification, marketization and even financialization never provide affordances for poorer households such as herders (see Zaloom and James 2023). Really-existing pastoralisms remain very much mixed systems and highly differentiated, with important policy and management implications.

Let’s examine these points in more detail, starting with describing how pastoralist systems can be viewed as infrastructural and then moving onto the issues and implications of its assetization.

Pastoralism as infrastructure and initial implications

I

While vastly different technologically, the critical infrastructures with which I am familiar–water, energy, telecoms, transportation, hazardous liquids–share the same operational logic: The system’s real time operators seek to increase process variance (in terms of diverse options, resources, strategies) in the face of high input variance (including variability in factors of production and climate) to achieve low and stable output variance (electricity, water and telecoms provided safely and continuously).

Again, we are back to the logic of requisite variety. Having a diversity of resource and strategic options, including being able to assemble, improvise or invent them, is a way to match and manage problem complexity so as to achieve by and large stable outputs.

I submit pastoralist systems are, in respect to this logic, infrastructural; and as pastoralists and their systems are found worldwide, so too is pastoralism a global infrastructure. To be sure, not all pastoralist systems share this logic; nor are all pastoralists real-time reliability professionals; nor do all pastoralist systems reduce to this logic, only.

II

If we focus on the set of pastoralist systems that share the logic, the implications for rethinking pastoralist development are, I believe, major. To pick four of the differences identified in earlier blogs:

1. The infrastructure perspective suggests that instead of talking about environmental risks associated with pastoralism (e.g., the climate risks of land degradation and methane production), we should be comparing the environmental footprints produced by the respective global infrastructures (e.g., roads globally, electricity globally, dams globally. . .).

Because pastoralisms rely on these other infrastructures, the respective footprints overlap. But the physical damage done to the environment by roads, dams, and power plants are well documented and demonstrably extend well far beyond pastoralist usage.

2. No large critical infrastructures can run 24/7/365 at 100% capacity and be reliable, and pastoralist systems are no different. This means comparing pastoralist livestock systems to a benchmark of “optimized” grassland ranching or intensive dairy production is ludicrous, if only because the latter are more likely headed to disaster anyway.

3. Restocking schemes are routinely criticized for returning livestock to low-resource rangelands. Yet the infrastructure for government commodity buffer stocks (e.g., holding grain, wool or oil in order to stabilize the prices of those commodities) are routinely recommended by other experts, decade after decade, be the countries low-resource or not.

4. When was the last time you heard pastoralist livestock exports from the world’s arid and semi-arid regions being praised for this: Reducing the global budget for virtual water trading from what it could have been. And yet, that is exactly what pastoralism as a global infrastructure does.

Assetizing pastoralisms as infrastructure

I

Think of assets and assetization as follows:

An asset is both a resource and property, in that it generates income streams with its sale price based on the capitalization of those revenues. Although an asset’s income streams can be financially sliced up, aggregated, and speculated upon across highly diverse geographies, there still has to be something underpinning these financial operations. Something has to generate the income that a political economic actor can lay claim to through a property or other right, entailing a process of enclosure, rent extraction, property formation, and capitalization. . . .

Commodities are produced for sale, and as such their value is defined by the labour imbued in them as they are substitutable and subject to laws of competition. In resting on rent and enclosure without a particular orientation towards sale, assetization instead involves “the transformation of things into resources which generate income without a sale”. . . .

The market value of an asset depends on the estimated future rents it will afford, so for there to be a market for rent-bearing property the purchaser must borrow against future rent and capital gains. It is only after this capitalization that there is a viable market for tradable rent-bearing property and, therein, an asset.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/epub/10.1177/20438206221130807

That rent-bearing aspect of assetization is often identified separately as securitization or financialization. As the above quote and its authors underscore, such assetization is a more nuanced, meso-or-lower-level concept than are macro notions like that of global capitalism.

The treatment of livestock or water points or fencing or motorbikes or vet stocks or rangeland as assets has been an undeniable feature of pastoralism. We may debate the history of doing so. My view is that the path dependency with respect to assets-thinking originated in the division of labor in earlier pastoralist societies as pre-capitalist commercial economies (think: trade routes and the early-on division between herd owners–anachronistically, “rent-seeking,” and their herd holders). Whatever, the variety of capitalist economies has subsequently ramped up the diversity of assetization and securitization within and across pastoralist systems.

II

But the point here is that diversity. Has pastoralism as a global infrastructure been assetized and securitized as fully as the other infrastructures described in the literature? More formally, has the logic of requisite variety with respect to input/process/output variability become a set of assets from which to realize profits and rents? “Not entirely–and significantly so” is my answer to both.

For example, the treatment of “human capital” seeks to assetize a rich process variance in pastoralism as infrastructure. You would have to be sycophants of economics not to see that reification of real-time management of process variance into “investments” does a great disservice to meso- and micro-level differentiation of practices with respect to options, resources and strategies, especially their real time versions.

It’s also easy to continue with such examples and questions by returning to points #1 – #4 and showing how “assetization” in those areas are underway yet in very complex ways.

Livestock and water become “ecological footprints,” a very different asset. Grassland systems as assets are not one-to-one with those in ranching schemes or the dairy sector. As for restocking schemes, it requires a different perspective to see them as part and parcel of commodity stock buffers. And yes, virtual water trading is assetized, but here too the assets in question differ considerably from those conventionally talked about in pastoralist systems.

Conclusion: So what?

I am suggesting that pastoralism as a global infrastructure resists assetization and securitization in ways that are, ironically, criticized by pastoralist advocates.

Start with the fact that the current literature on infrastructure financialization focuses on how schools, health facilities, police and large infrastructure projects are assetized for the purposes of securing specific rents and profits over time. Critics understandably see these developments in negative terms.

If so, why then are the critics casting in overwhelming negative terms those persistent failures and difficulties in establishing–read: assetizing and securitizing–fixed-point pastoralist schools, permanent health facilities, pacified zones free of armed conflict, and large livestock development projects?

Where some of these “failures” are in fact those of having prevented full-scale assetization and securitization, how is that a failure of pastoralism as its own functioning infrastructure? A threat to pastoralist resistance, perhaps, but when these fixed-point interventions do fail, they fail only in the sense their government and NGO advocates should have known better anyway.

Or to put the point from a different, more positive direction: By viewing pastoralism as infrastructure, do we invoke a longer-term at work than would be the case, were its assets rendered wholly or considerably turbulent by virtue of sudden changes in exchange rates and interest rates?

Sources

Birch, K., and Ward, C. (2022). Assetization and the ‘new asset geographies.’ Dialogues in Human Geography (accessed on line at https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/20438206221130807). In addition to the quote, this article provided two examples.

De Conti, B., Bosari, P., and Martínez, M. (2022). “Credit rating agencies as policymakers: the different stances in regard to core and peripheral countries during the pandemic.” Texto para Discussão. ISSN 0103-9466. Unicamp. IE, Campinas, n. 438.

McArthur, J. (2023). “Infrastructure debt funds and the assetization of public infrastructures. Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space (https://doi.org/10.1177/0308518X231216319)

Roe, E. (2020). A New Policy Narrative for Pastoralism? Pastoralists as Reliability Professionals and Pastoralist Systems as Infrastructure, STEPS Working Paper 113, STEPS Centre: Brighton, UK (available online at https://steps-centre.org/publication/a-new-policy-narrative-for-pastoralism/). This paper provides many details and examples of input, process and output variance.

Rogers, S. (2023). “The emergence of the ‘rentocrat.’” New Political Economy (https://doi.org/10.1080/13563467.2023.2172148).

Sonenscher, M. (2022) Capitalism: The story behind the word. Princeton University Press, Princeton NJ. This book goes into great detail about the differences between earlier commercial societies and later capitalist economies.

Zaloom, C. and D. James (2023). “Financialization and the Household.” Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 52: 399–415 (https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-anthro-052721-100947). Note a repeated finding of theirs: “Writing against the financialization of daily life framework, which implies a one-way, top-down intrusion of the market into intimate relations, we explore how householders use finance within systems of social obligations. Financial and household value are not opposed, we argue” (p. 399; also pp. 400, 403, 406, and 410).