Thinking infrastructurally about: what is not said, but could be, in pastoralist development; resilience in pastoralist settings; in-kind compensation to herders; and rangeland carrying capacity

---

1. Thinking infrastructurally about what is not said, but could be, in pastoralist development

(1) “We must fight for the expansion of pastoralism as a universal public infrastructure, just as is now being done for universally available electricity.”

(2) “Government agencies and donors working in pastoralism ask to be overhauled so as to meet pastoralist needs faster and more effectively.”

(3) “Pastoralists explain their responses to government and donor initiatives this way: ‘We corrected your design problems on the ground. Our job as reliability professionals, after all, is to protect you, too.'”

(4) “We herding professionals refuse to play the game conjured up by you outside analysts that starts with your tables and numbers of livestock. Why? Because your follow-on question is almost immediately: ‘But who owns the livestock?’ And, sooner than a blink of the eye, we are down to: ‘But what about the old woman with 5 goats or fewer?’

As if to ask us: ‘What are you going to do about these inequalities?’ And leaving us hardly any time to reply that, well, the most ethical thing in response is to see if there are more useful ways to think about this problem than one starting with livestock owned and held.”

---

2. Thinking infrastructurally about resilience in pastoralist settings

I

The opposite of the coping herder, who can only react to external shocks, is the resilient herder, who bounces back. But is that true? Both occur at the individual level, but from an infrastructure perspective, the opposite of the individual is something like “team situational awareness” in its control centers, not another individual herder who is “non-resilient.”

We observed the professionals in control rooms of critical infrastructures undertaking four types of resilience at their system level, each varying by stage of system operations:

Table 1. Different Types of System Resilience

• Professionals adjusting back to within de jure or de facto bandwidths to continue normal operations (precursor resilience);
• Restoration from disrupted operations (temporary loss of service) back to normal operations by the professionals (restoration resilience);
• Immediate emergency response (its own kind of resilience) after system failure but often involving other professionals from different from systems; and
• Recovery of the system to a new normal by reliability professionals along with others, including new stakeholders (recovery resilience)

Resilience this way is a set of options, processes and strategies undertaken by the system’s real-time managers and tied to the state of system operations in which they find themselves. Resilience differs depending on whether the large sociotechnical system is in normal operations versus disrupted operations versus failed operations versus recovered operations. (Think of pastoralist systems here as critical infrastructure.)

Resilience, as such, is not a single property of the system to be turned on or off as and when needed. Nor is it, as a system feature, reducible to anything like individual “resilient” herders, though such herders exist.

II

So what?

What you take to be the loss of the herd, a failure in pastoralist operations that you say comes inevitably with drought, may actually be perceived and treated by pastoralists themselves as a temporary disruption after which operations are to be restored. While you, the outsider, can say their “temporary” really isn’t temporary these days, it is the herders’ definition of “temporary” that matters when it comes to their real-time reliability.

Herder systems that maintain normal operations are apt to demonstrate what we call precursor resilience. Normal doesn’t mean what happens when there are no shocks to the system. Shocks happen all the time, and normal operations are all about responding to them in such a way as to ensure they don’t lead to temporary system disruption or outright system failure. Shifting from one watering point, when a problem arises there, to another within a range of good-enough fallbacks, is one such strategy. Labelling this, “coping,” seriously misrepresents the active system management going on.

Pastoralist systems can and do experience temporary stoppages in their service provision—raiders seize livestock, remittances don’t arrive, off-take of livestock products is interrupted, lightning triggers a veldt fire—and here the efforts at restoring conditions back to usual is better termed restoration resilience. Access to alternative feed stocks or sources of livelihood may be required in the absence of grazing and watering fallbacks normally available.

So too resilience as a response to shocks looks very different by way of management strategies when the shocks lead to system failure and recovery from that failure. In these circumstances, an array of outside, inter-organizational resources and personnel—public, private, NGO, humanitarian—are required in addition to the resources of the pastoralist herders. These recovery arrangements and resources are unlike anything marshaled by way of precursor or restoration resiliencies within the herder communities themselves.

III

There is nothing predetermined in the Table 1 sequence. Nothing says it is inevitable that the failed system recovers to a new normal (indeed the probability of system failure in recovery can be higher than in normal operations). It is crucial, nevertheless, to distinguish recovery from any new normal. To outsiders, it may look like some of today’s pastoralist systems are in unending recovery, constantly trying to catch up with one drought or disaster after another. The reality may be that some systems—not all!—are already at a new normal, operating with a very different combination of options, strategies and resources than before.

If you think of resilience in a pastoralist system as “the system’s capability in the face of its reliability mandates to withstand the downsides of uncertainty as well as exploit the upsides of new possibilities and opportunities that emerge in real time,” then they are able to do so because of being capable to undertake the different types of resiliencies listed here, contingent on the stage of operations herders as a collectivity find themselves.

Or to put the key point from the other direction, a system demonstrating precursor resilience, restoration resilience, emergency response coordination and recovery resilience is the kind of system better able to withstand the downsides of shocks and uncertainty and exploit their upsides. Here too, nothing predetermines that every pastoralist system will exhibit all four resiliencies, if and when their states of operation change.

Finally, a mistake to avoid. When response and recovery are difficult to separate or these “stages” occur together, then response and recovery resiliences are also hard to tease apart and separate out. The danger is that “resilience” may be relegated only to the planning for the mitigation of longer-term recovery efforts.

---

3. Rethinking the role of in-kind transfers in rural and herding settings

I

Three recent entries in Ian Scoones’ blog, Zimbabweland, raise for me a way of rethinking the longstanding notion in pastoralist studies of “in-kind compensation,” now within the current settings.[1]

One entry talks about contributing goats instead of cash to a rural rotational savings group. Another spoke of parents who contribute their management time and skills to rural projects whose laborers are paid by the parents’ children. A third entry talks about people repaying their creditors with tobacco rather than cash.

Those who point to the relentless spread of the cash economy can and do point to herders who were once compensated in the form of, say, a calf or lamb, but are now paid in the monetized form of wages. I want to suggest that the payment-in-kind in the preceding paragraph need not be seen as reversion to past practices because the cash economy has somehow failed, but because in-kind transfers practiced in the past are fit-for-purpose in the cash economy as well.

II

I work in the field of infrastructure studies. A shift from automated (electronic, digital) operations to manual, hands-on operations triggered by an incident is often described as reverting to the older practice or earlier technology. The telemetry shows an automatic shut-off isn’t working; a crew member is sent into the field to turn it on/off by hand or other means.

But it is misleading to think of that example as reversion to past practices. Why? Because the shifts from (more) automated to (more) manual operations are with respect to the today’s system and their standards of system reliability, not the earlier ones. The system in my example hasn’t failed because it resorts to manual operations. Indeed, the latter are instead an essential part of keeping today’s system continuously reliable, even during turbulent events.

III

A perfect example of in-kind transfers having this function in the cash economy comes from one of the blogs: “The flow of food and other agricultural goods (vegetables, meat and so on) from land reform areas is significant, and essential for food security and social protection in urban areas of Zimbabwe, as well as in communal areas where many settlers originally came from.”

If I am reading the blog entry correctly, food security won’t be as reliable as it is without these in-kind transfers–even leaving open the question of whether food security in the past was more or less reliable than now.

IV

But what about rural herders and pastoralists in particular? Of course, there is increased commodification and monetization of practices from the rural past to the rural present. But that is not to the point here.

Even where there are waged herders, it still may be, e.g., women or others provide unpaid labor with respect to caring for pregnant, calving or injured livestock.[2] More generally (and I could be wrong), the persistence of in-kind transfers within a cash economy may be more about local justice than it is about the global injustices of the cash nexus.[3]

—-

[1] See “Financing agriculture: what are the challenges and opportunities in Zimbabwe?,” “Managing money: savings and investment in Zimbabwean agriculture,” and “The changing remittance economy in Zimbabwe” (accessed online at, among other links, https://zimbabweland.wordpress.com/2024/01/29/managing-money-savings-and-investment-in-zimbabwean-agriculture/)

[2] Linda Pappagallo (2024). Recasting tenure and labour in non-equilibrium environments: Making the case for “high-reliability” pastoral institutions. Land Use Policy 138: 5 (accessed online at https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0264837723005008)

[3] I touch upon how the practices of local justice systems remain highly salient in globalized settings in http://When Complex is as Simple as it Gets: Guide for Recasting Policy and Management in the Anthropocene

---

4. Thinking infrastructurally about rangeland carrying capacity

I

The key problem in my view with the notion of “rangeland carrying capacity” is the assumption that it’s about livestock. That notion invites you to conjure up livestock shoulder-to-shoulder on a parcel of land and then ask you: How could this not be a physical limit on the number of livestock per unit of land? You can’t pack anymore on it and that has to be a capacity constraint. Right?

Wrong. Livestock numbers on a piece of land are not a system. The number of its pipes, rods and valves are not an operating nuclear power plant. Yes, livestock systems that provide continuous and important services (like meat, milk, wool. . .) have limits. But these limits are set by managing physical constraints, be it LSU/ha or not. More, this management combines with managing other constraints like access to markets, remittances for household members abroad, nearby land encroachment, and much else.

Can herders make management mistakes? Of course. That is why pastoralists-to-pastoralists learning is so important.

From this perspective, it’s not “rangeland carrying capacity” we should be talking about, but “rangeland management capacity”. Or better yet, “rangeland management capacities,” as there is not just one major type of pastoralism, but many different pastoralist systems of production and provision of livestock-related services.

---