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).