Culled below from my blog entries on pastoralists and pastoralism are six sets of proposals most relevant, I believe, for the IYRP 2026 policy and management agenda.
Recasting (inter)national pastoralist policies
Start with the conventional point of departure: Pastoralists are being displaced from their usual herding places by, e.g., land encroachment, sedentarization, climate change, mining, or other factors.
One major question then 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
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.
In the same spirit, let me end with a question: Have you come across anything like Export Credit Agencies (import-export agencies in the OECD, US, or elsewhere) that provide buyer credits to ASAL nations (like in East Africa and the Horn) so that ASAL development banks or parastatals there (e.g., their livestock commissions) can buy catastrophe bonds from those Western country issuers to insure against ASAL drought or livestock failures?
Pastoralism as a worldwide infrastructure
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).
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.
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.
Authoritative websites for real-time decisionmaking with respect to pastoralist and herder development
I propose there be an authoritative websites established for real-time decisionmaking concerning livestock herders and their evolving systems worldwide.
There are many reasons such websites is needed. For me, the most underacknowledged is this: Just as there are ‘VPN activists,’ people who create and distribute VPNs (virtual private networks) to enable circumvention of Internet censorship, so too is there is need for authoritative websites to circumvent and correct for those persistently distorted narratives and approaches to pastoralist development.
More generally, an authoritative website provides sought-after, up-to-date and linked knowledge so quickly and reliably that it is continuously browsed by increasing numbers of users who click on the website early and often in their search for on-point information, in this case about pastoralists:
• These websites do not pretend to provide final or definitive information, but rather seek to assure and ensure the quality of the topical information continually up-dated.
• The website serves as a clearinghouse that encourages cross-checking and tailoring of information on, e.g., pastoral development, while acting also as a springboard for future information search and exchange. It is popular because it shortens the number of steps to search for salient information.
• Well-known U.S. example: Going online to http://www.mayoclinic.org after an initial cancer diagnosis.
In our illustrative scenario, the policy professional starts her analysis on pastoralist development by searching–let’s give it a name–http://www.RealTime_Pastoralism.org:
• S/he goes to this website on the well-established better practice that information becomes increasingly policy or management relevant when the people gathering the information are the ones actually using that information.
• That is, the authoritative website is constructed and maintained as a platform to make real-time searching and browsing easier for searchers, not least of whom are project and program managers.
• It is authoritative because: (1) it is online, that is, can be kept up-to-date in ways other media can’t; and (2) it is digital, that is, can be curated for salient multimedia, including but not limited to: video, podcasts, blogs, reports, articles, chatrooms, graphics-rich tutorials, advice line (“ask the professionals”), and its own YouTube channel.
Such websites may already exist on a regional, cooperative, or site/livestock specific basis, though we must wonder to what extent they are linked and curated together (i.e., analogous to meta-analyses of published research findings).
Who funds, provides content, and curates the proposed authoritative websites is, of course, the question, e.g., a consortium of researchers, centers, journals and foundations. Language will of course be an obstacle, insurmountable in some cases (that’s why it is not a single website). But the broader point I’m making here remains the same:
ARGUABLY, THE MOST “PRO-PASTORALIST POLICY” OF A GOVERNMENT OR NGO IS HAVING ITS DECISONMAKERS SEARCH ONLINE FOR BETTER INFORMATION IN THEIR REAL-TIME PROBLEM-SOLVING WITH RESPECT TO PASTORALIST REAL-TIME ISSUES.
Pastoralist conflicts
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.
For example, 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).
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 pastoralist livestock raid is always more than a livestock raid.
Thinking infrastructurally about rangeland carrying capacity
The key problem 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.
Against environmental livestock-tarring
If corporate greenwashing is, as one definition has it, “an umbrella term for a variety of misleading communications and practices that intentionally or not, induce false positive perceptions of a system’s environmental performance,” then environmental livestock-tarring is “an umbrella term for a variety of misleading communications and practices that intentionally or not, induce false negative perceptions of a system’s environmental performance with respect to livestock.”
Far too much time has been spent on defending pastoralism against environmental critiques, when those critiques are little more than livestock-tarring. Which raises the bigger policy question: What are the benefits of doing so?
That is, who benefits when the traditional understanding of dryland herds as assets is reconfigured into herds as global environmental liabilities? One consequence of this reconfiguration is to exclude pastoralists from being considered part of the near-global asset boom in rising prices of stock, bonds and real-estate. Livestock tarring is, I suggest, a way to distract the rest of us from recognizing that herd owners/managers were and continue to be entrapped in asset bubbles, and by thee way on a very global scale.
WHEN COMPLEX IS AS SIMPLE AS IT GETS 
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