1. Pastoralism-as-infrastructure is more difficult to assetized than other infrastructures
Once you start to think of pastoralist systems as complex infrastructures in their own right and globally so, an informative contrast emerges: While 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 financial returns.
Now, of course, 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. But the question here is: “Has pastoralism as a global infrastructure been assetized and securitized as fully as the other infrastructures?” My answer: not entirely, and significantly so.
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 rents and profits over time. Critics understandably see these developments in negative terms.
Why then are persistent failures and difficulties in establishing–read: assetizing–fixed-point pastoralist schools, stationary health facilities, and large livestock projects treated in overwhelmingly negative terms by like-minded critics? Some of these “failures” are in fact those of having prevented full-scale assetization.
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 turbulent by virtue of sudden changes in markets and finance? In this view, the benchmark to compare pastoralist systems isn’t some optimized livestock or dairy facility but rather what’s called the “co-living” sector with individual beds to rent and shared work spaces to contract.
2. Pastoralist “land-use conflict” requires much more differentiation for today’s policy and management
Return to the logic of requisite variety in our framework. 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 far more differentiated. Pastoralists who are reliability professionals might also be involved (raiders are not to be dismissed as a homogeneous mob of thieves). That is to say, references to pastoralist raids, skirmishes and flare-ups are bound to very misleading if they do not identify the scenarios “with-respect-to” what inputs, processes or outputs are sought to be managed in those raids that have been organized.
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).
More specifically, 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 emergency response to having the entire system of operations or herd disappear because of some other systemwide calamity, like drought. The policy and management implications differ because in one you are restoring back to a system’s normal operations, whereas in the latter you are recovering to a new normal, which requires far more and different stakeholders.
It also 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, livestock raids–or other kinds of incursion–are treated more than events from the perspective of our framework.
“Land-use conflict,” in other words, is a fairly useless summary for describing what has been morphing for decades in pastoralist areas.
3. The last thing you should expect is “the collapse of pastoralist society”
I type “collapse of pastoralist societies?” into Google search and get this AI-generated answer:
Pastoralist societies have been declining for a variety of reasons, including:
- Lack of government support: Pastoral communities receive little support from their governments.
- Loss of land: Pastoralists have lost access to land due to the development of large-scale cultivation and irrigation, the establishment of nature reserves and game parks, and the imposition of national boundaries.
- Climate change: Climate change has threatened the availability of water and arable land, which are critical for pastoralism.
- Government policies: Governments have expropriated land from pastoralists, and converted communal property systems to open access situations.
- Migration: Some pastoralists have moved to populous areas to pursue education, abandoning traditional lifestyles.
- Conflict: Conflict, disease, drought, and famine have particularly affected vulnerable pastoralist communities.
- Arms proliferation: Arms proliferation has significantly altered the pastoralism landscape.
No surprises here. This is the gist of what I’ve been reading for years. But the obvious question remains from the standpoint of our framework of pastoralists as reliability professionals and pastoralism as a critical infrastructure: How many pastoralists see this in the same way or for the same reasons?
I don’t know their number, but I most certainly see how some herders might well believe their pastoralist systems are changing dramatically but nevertheless adhere to a very different narrative of what is going on and being responded to. After all, pastoralist systems are complex; they are managed complexly.
To see how and why, turn to a recent article that describes the opposite case: Urban people who see it inevitable that modern societies are indeed collapsing but who act differently than we all might expect.
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In his 2024 preprint, “The conviction of the inevitable: Collapsism and collective action in contemporary rural France,” Jérôme Tournadre, a political scientist and sociologist, wonders why some people who are absolutely convinced on the inevitability of collapse in modern (“thermo-industrial”) societies–for them, it’s self-evident the collapse is underway–nonetheless respond by moving to the countryside and not acting fatalistically in a variety of different ways.
You might think those differences included “going back to nature” and eschewing all things modern and technological. But no, and here is where it gets interesting for pastoralist comparison:
Sophie, for example, has no trouble using a thermal brush cutter when it comes to freeing agricultural commons from overly invasive vegetation. Alex earns a little money by occasionally installing photovoltaic panels for individuals. However, he does not see the need to use it at home insofar as his connection to the electricity grid satisfies him. Similarly, if the members of the neo-village [one of the research sites] have chosen to gradually do without cars, it is not to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions but, above all, to no longer depend on oil that is bound to become rare or to lose its usefulness in a collapsed world. This logic obviously leads them to use bicycles but also to learn how to handle and maintain tools such as the scythe, the lumberjack’s handsaw or the Japanese saw that is supposed to replace both the chainsaw and the jigsaw. The acquisition of new skills is in any case a central ambition within these collective actions, which endeavour to break away from the specialization found in industrial civilization and develop a versatility more in line with troubled times: knowing how to milk goats and process their milk, graft fruit trees, recognize wild plants and mushrooms, etc.
Now turn this quote toward pastoralists. Say you do find pastoralists who are convinced that their systems are actually truly collapsing and that collapse is inevitable. We nonetheless have to ask: So what?
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Say you see pastoralists acquiring new skills, while at the same time continuing to milk the goats and process milk and collect local herbs. Say you see them cutting firewood for burning but relying on electricity where available. Say you see them undertaking money-paying jobs off-site. Say you see them breaking away from the specializations of pastoralism and developing other versatilities for the same environment.
Yes, there are also alarming turnabouts in contemporary pastoralist societies, but as Tournadre and other colleagues put it, this is an “alarmed reflexivity.” That is to say, some pastoralists, like some urbanites, are alarmed by events in their respective systems. But their response is a more nuanced practice than it is outright exit. They are like whistleblowers who still live among us: “Something’s wrong here and it has to change and here’s what I have to say and am doing.”
4. For the purposes of policy and management, there are important differences between reliability professionals who are networked and individual pastoralists operating on their own
In our framework, reliability professionals are central to translating statements of systemwide policies, laws and regulations into reliable real-time operations within and across the system infrastructures. This means reliability professionals are neither macro-designers located in the infrastructure’s headquarters nor micro-operators at individual facilities. Instead, they operate in between the macro- and the micro-levels, working in a very important middle domain within the infrastructure as a whole.
In this domain of expertise, infrastructure reliability in systemwide operations is achieved only if macro-designs are modified into different scenarios that take into account local conditions affecting infrastructure operations and where the real-time better practices that have evolved across a diversity of really-existing cases of operations are applied so as to ensure achievement of the original reliability mandates of policies, laws and regulation.
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For example, the land board’s longstanding policy may be that livestock watering boreholes should be spaced 8 kilometers (5 miles) apart in order to reduce the effects of overgrazing. Indeed, land board members and staff may still insist it is their policy, even when your map of actual livestock water boreholes shows conclusively that boreholes are not spaced 8km apart on the ground. Does your map of allocated boreholes mean the 8km rule is not really land board policy?
No, it doesn’t
It is better to say that any such macro-policy has to be modified in practice because site conditions, aquifers, range composition and livestock characteristics differ so much (e.g., the hardveld is not the same as the sandveld). Furthermore, actually-existing practices for siting and spacing livestock boreholes evolve across all the land boards and all such sitings, and this more up-to-date knowledge can or actually does help them in the placement of new livestock water boreholes (e.g. more knowledge and mapping now exist about the underground aquifers).
In other words, to say this map of livestock watering boreholes shows that the spacing policy was NOT in fact implemented misses the fundamental point that the policy was indeed implemented by land board members and staff in ways that cannot be attributed to their being expedient or corrupt. Even if the latter were true in some cases, no policy can be reliable if it is one-size-fits-all.
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The chief implication of the preceding example is that the locus and focus of “implementation” shifts from micro-site—”drilling this borehole right here and right now”—to the middle domain where reliability professionals convert macro-policies into local contingency scenarios—”siting the borehole this side differs for us from siting the borehole that side”—and where better systemwide practices that have emerged out of all siting and spacing activities since the policy was adopted are used to modify new placements.
This means that the micro-operators at any individual site—the drilling rig and operator, the borehole owner(s) and their specific herds and herders—are not the only unit and level of analysis for the actual implementation, here and now of the 8km policy. Implementation of borehole siting and spacing also takes place when teams or groups of reliability professionals adapt borehole siting and spacing in light of both locally contingent conditions and newer systemwide practices developing across different conditions relevant for up-to-date, reliable borehole placement.
In short, the ambit of implementation expands from the site’s micro-operator to the system’s reliability professionals. One or two drilling rig operators may be preferred by livestock owners because of their skills in getting results. But these drilling rig operators are reliability professionals when they also work with land board members/staff in the latter’s effort to identify more reliable scenarios for actual sitings as well as more up-to-date systemwide siting/spacing practices on the ground.
Or take another example. When the paravet is great one-on-one, developing unique relationships with each of his or her clients, then s/he is a micro-operator. When that same paravet acts according to his or her official job definition–“A para-veterinary worker is a veterinary science expert who, as part of a veterinary aid system, performs procedures autonomously or semi-autonomously”–then that system and team component point to his or her being a reliability professional or at least expected to be. (Note these networks can be informal and not just formal ones.)
5. When it comes to mixed agriculture/livestock systems, reliability-seeking and risk-averting are not the same thing
Risk-averse agro-pastoralists keep multiple varieties of crops, livestock and/or sites so that, if one fails, they have others to fall back on. The more different crops, livestock and sites the agro-pastoralist can muster and maintain, the greater the chances they won’t lose everything. Where possible, the risk-averse agro-pastoralist, even if on their own, avoids hazards whose probabilities and uncertainties cannot be managed so as to maintain a survival mix of crops, livestock and productive sites. These risk-averse agro-pastoralists face a land carrying capacity that sets exogenous limits on the total crops and livestock produced.
Reliability-seeking agro-pastoralists keep multiple varieties of crops, livestock and/or sites because any single resource—e.g., the soil that sustains the crop, site and livestock—is managed more reliably if it provides multiple services. The more crops, livestock and sites agro-pastoralists can muster and maintain, the greater the chances they can meet peak demands made on the entire production system. Reliability-seeking agro-pastoralists together seek to manage the probabilities and uncertainties of hazards that cannot be avoided so as to maintain a peak mix of crops, livestock and sites. Reliability-seeking agro-pastoralists face a land carrying capacity whose endogenous limits are set by their group skills for and experience with different operating scales and production phases.
Upshot: Agro-pastoralist behavior, no matter if labelled “subsistence” or “traditional,” that
- is developed around high technical competence and highly complex activities,
- requires high levels of sustained performance, oversight and flexibility,
- is continually in search of improvement,
- maintains great pressures, incentives and expectations for continuous overall production, and
- is predicated on maintaining peak (not minimum) livestock numbers in a highly reliable fashion without threatening the limits of system survival
is scarcely what one would totalize as “risk-averse.”
6. Frustration and who pastoralists talk to are more relevant to policy and management than might be supposed
Researchers are frustrated, pastoralists are frustrated, NGO staff are frustrated, and so too government officials. From the perspective of our framework, there is so much to be frustrated over when it comes to managing variability over inputs, outputs and processes to transform the former into the latter.
The good news is when learning to handle frustrations means having to think more about what works and that more thinking can mean–no guarantees here!–better handling of the frustrations ahead. To my mind, the center of gravity around frustration highlights what’s missing in notions of “resilience in the face of uncertainty.” Better handling frustrations over having to manage variability in inputs, outputs and processes is what separates shifting from having fallen back in disruption to seeking to bounce forward afterwards.
These frustrations are also better appreciated when recast as the core driver of relationships between and among pastoralists, researchers, NGOs and government staff. Bluntly stated and following a long line of psychologists, this is how the principal sides know they are in a relationship: They’re frustrated, one way or both ways.
This is why I make who are pastoralists actually talking to such a big issue for the framework. Are they actually frustrated with this really-existing government official or that actually-existing NGO staff person? Are they in a relationship, however, asymmetrical, or is it that others are just a nuisance for them, if that?
7. Reframing a major public policy issue–in this case the last major drought in East Africa–leads to different policy and management implications for pastoralist development
Start with recent debates over periodizing World War II. It’s one thing to stay with the conventional periodization of 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 that pivotal European paroxysm.
In the latter perspective, the December 1941 – September 1945 paroxysm, with the Shoah and the Eastern front carnage, was short and embedded in a longer series of large regional wars. These in turn were less preludes to one another than an unfolding process that was 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.)
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Now think of the 2020 – 2023 East Africa drought as one such paroxysm, with drought-related conflicts leading up to and following from it. What follows for policy and management there?
From the framework perspective, current emergency management conceptions about “longer-term recovery” would be considerably problematized when the longer term is one drought unfolding into another drought and so on. For example, “immediate emergency response” after failure of the wet season looks considerably less immediate when embedded in always recovering before the next wet season that fails.
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What does it mean to frame the 2020 – 2023 East Africa drought as a paroxysm that extends both the spatial and temporal terms of “recurring drought response and recovery across East Africa”?
At least one obvious point follows from that “recurrent.” Think immediately of government and NGO budgets for their respective recurrent operations in pastoralist areas. Or more negatively, you’re looking at the recurrent cost shortfalls of East Africa governments–which, to my mind, are not given the same kind of attention as the many reported failures of capital development projects and programs in pastoralist areas.
One of the major reasons why “recurring drought response and recovery” is better understood as a part of government’s recurrent budget shortfall is because pastoralists give recurrent priority to the recurrent prevention of real-time disasters and the need for outside recurrent support to do that.
8. “Adaptable” and “flexible” are not granular enough to catch the place-specific nature of pastoralist improvisation
Return to an old resource management typology, the two dimensions of which are: (1) fixed resources/mobile resources and (2) fixed management/mobile management. The frequent example of the mobile resources/mobile management cell has been pastoralist (nomadic/transhumant) herders. Or from the standpoint of sustaining biodiversity across wide rangelands, some pastoralist systems are examples of mobile management (e.g., of grazers or browsers) with respect to fixed resources (different patches at different points and times along routes or itineraries).
Now ratchet up the complexity: What had been mobile management must now be fixed; and what had been a fixed resource or asset now must be mobile.
Example: During the COVID lockdown, some pastoralists created informal bush markets at or near their kraals as alternatives to the now-shuttered formal marketplaces. So too do formal associations of pastoralists participating in distant conference negotiations or near-by problem-solving meetings exemplify a now differently fixed resource exercising now differently-mobile management.
In short, terms, like “adaptable” and “flexible,” are not granular enough to catch the place-specific contingencies and ingenuity in undertaking shifts from fixed to mobile or mobile to fixed.
9. What we don’t hear in pastoralist development or, These are the imaginaries to talk about!
“We must fight for the expansion of pastoralism as a universal public infrastructure, just as is now being done for universally available electricity!”
Government agencies and donors working in pastoralism ask to be overhauled so as to meet pastoralist needs faster and more effectively. (“The C.D.C. director, Rochelle Walensky,. . .called for her agency to be overhauled after an external review found it had failed to respond quickly and clearly to Covid.”)
Pastoralists explain their responses to government and donor initiatives this way: “We corrected a few things on the ground. Our job, after all, is to protect you.”
Researchers on pastoralism agree that the people and areas they study are usefully marginal and marginalized. In point of fact, pastoralisms provide the only valid commentary on the center where researchers, among so many others, are routinely to be found.
“We refuse to play the game conjured up by analyses that start with tables and numbers of livestock. The follow-on question, almost immediate, is 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: ‘What are you going to do about these inequalities?’ Thus leaving us hardly any time to reply that, well, the most ethical thing in response is to see if there are more effective ways to think about this problem than one starting with livestock owned and held.”
10. Technologies are missing in a major crisis narrative about pastoralism, but not its counternarratives, and why this matters for pastoralist development
Google the phrase “environmental criticisms of pastoralism because of the climate emergency” and you get the AI-generated response (January 15 2025):
Environmental criticisms of pastoralism in the context of climate change primarily center around the potential for overgrazing, leading to land degradation, reduced biodiversity, and increased greenhouse gas emissions from livestock, especially when faced with changing weather patterns that can limit access to grazing land and water sources, making pastoralists more vulnerable to climate change impacts.
It is easy to find empirical evidence to counter this narrative. The AI-generated sweep itself goes on to support the well-known finding, e.g.: “Strong community-based management systems can help regulate grazing practices and protect fragile ecosystems.”
I draw attention, however, to what is missing, at least in my reading, from the crisis narrative and its versions but more clearly seen in the counternarratives: technologies.
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Climate change–more correctly, climate emergency–is a set of threat scenarios increasingly important to the evolving genre variously called “useful fiction” or FICINT (fictional intelligence). While the terms are recent, much has been written about them and their deep roots in past literary developments.
The central idea is to combine very different media–visual as well as written (and written not only in the form of fictional passages with characters and plot, but also incorporating current statistical trends and scholarly findings)–so as to persuade readers that the scenarios portrayed are in fact existential threats and must be acted upon. Much of this genre has been developed in the areas of national security and extreme climate (see Sources below from which points have been extracted here).
For our thought experiment below, what is of special interest is that FICINT
has developed a framework of guidelines that center around the ‘no vaporware’ rule. Vaporware is technology that has been imagined, but is not yet created. To ensure that FicInt remains feasible and grounded in legitimate technology, all technology included in the story must be developed or in development. In addition, FicInt character behavior should be based on past real-world situations. Finally, FicInt should use appropriate facts and research to justify the narrative.
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So, let’s say that important parts of pastoralist development are full of useful fictions. While some of the associated narratives are orthogonal to others (e.g., models of open-access grazing versus models of the managed commons), others appeal to varieties of different evidence and different trends to support their versions of realistic, near-term threat scenarios.
Focus on those cases where empirical uncertainties are high with respect pastoralist development in the midst of abrupt, extreme climate. For those cases, which narrative(s) to believe?
One answer is to focus on the curious asymmetry between the aforementioned dominant narrative and counternarratives when it comes to the role and presence of technologies in each. The primary technology in the dominant narrative and its versions is the cow, and here negatively as a methane producer and not positively as possessor of that rumen also able to make use of that lignin content in dryland grasses. This technology–and so too for other primary livestock–also move across grasslands and water points that however are, technologically speaking, either there or not.
In contrast and again in my reading, the counternarratives are much more populated by technologies and different socio-technical systems for their operation and management. Even the model of the managed commons can have fences. Cattle boreholes have to be operated and maintained. Livestock are transported by lorries, even airlifted for mountain pastures. Supply chains going out drylands and coming in are important. Agro-pastoralism adds even more technologies. Once again, add context and contingency, and counternarratives about socio-technical systems are inevitable.
So what, though?
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Now take a hypothetically context-less technology called “rotational grazing” and insert it in each narrative, dominant or counter. Ask yourself directly: How can this insertion be rendered into a useful fiction?
Well, in some cases “rotational grazing” is already going on, even if the practice doesn’t look like the textbook ideal (e.g., use of a drift fence to separate grazing from crops, but open to grazing of the stubble after harvest). In other cases, even if it doesn’t reduce overgrazing, the fiction of “rotational grazing” is kept so as to ensure claim to the land and its water point(s). Or in different instances, livestock are transported by lorry for fattening or supplemental feeding, even if it’s still useful to liken this to the “mobility” of old-time rotations between wet and dry season grazing in earlier or less extreme climate periods.
Which pastoralist development narratives, then, are likely to be found more credible by more people when it comes to (still arguably) realistic or near-term threat scenarios: those that center around a few technologies–cattle, water points and wire-and-pole fences–or those narratives far more differentiated technologically for management purposes?
Sources
Annick, A. (2021) “FicInt: Anticipating Tomorrow’s Conflict.” Accessed online at https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2021/march/ficint-anticipating-tomorrows-conflict
Di Feo, M. (2021) “Overcoming Complexity of (Cyber)War: The Logic of Useful
Fiction in Cyber Exercises Scenarios.” Accessed online at https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2940/paper32.pdf
Engberg-Pedersen, A. (2025). “The National Security Novel: ‘Useful Fiction,’ Persuasive Emotions, and the Securitization of Literature.” Critical Inquiry, 51(2) Winter.
11. Disaster averted is central to pastoralist development
One major implication of the framework is that if disasters averted by pastoralists were more identified and differentiated, we’d better understand how 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 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. Instead, we are repeatedly told that what matters much more are the disasters of late capitalism, modernity and environmental collapse.
Even where the latter is true, that truth must be pushed further to incorporate the importance of disasters-averted-now. These matter to herders precisely because herders actively dread specific disasters, whatever the root causes.
Claiming that over-arching explanations are empirical generalizations made across complex cases too often voids the case-specific diversity of responses and emerging practices of importance for policy and management.
Why? Because appeals to processes or state conditions generalized as “marketization,” “commodification,” “precarity” and the like run the risk of diminishing 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 show how these broad processes are chronic and how they preoccupy real time because herders have failed to avert dreaded events altogether.
In other words: Just what is marketization with respect to in your case at hand? Smallstock? Mechanized deliveries? Alpine grazing? Is it in terms of migrant herders here rather than there, or with respect to other types of livestock or environmental conditions? Where so, the under-acknowledged methodological issue moves center-stage: How do the broader processes summarized as “marketization” get redefined by the very different with-respect-to’s?
Here’s an example of the importance of disasters averted over time. I recently read a fine piece mentioning today’s Pokot elites and Turkana elders in Kenya. This made me smile. 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.”
So my question: What am I to make of the fact that some of the poor pastoralists of then are better off now?
More formally: “Under what conditions do pastoralists, initially poor but today better off, become elites in the negative sense familiar to criticism of elites?” This is important because an over-arching development aim of the first-generation ASAL programs was to assist then-poor pastoralists to become better-off.
My answer now would focus on the disasters averted over time by the now-elites compared to those who remained poor in the same period. It seems to me essential to establish if equally (resource-) poor pastoralists nonetheless differentiated themselves over time in terms of how they (and others with them) averted disasters that would have befallen them had they not managed or coped 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, this focus on disasters-averted holds for those who were not advantaged then but are so now.
12. Resilience isn’t what you think
As a first pass, it would seem that the opposite of the coping herder, who can only react to external shocks, is the resilient herder, who bounces back from the same. But how true is that? Both occur at the individual level, and the opposite of the individual is the collective (think “team situational awareness”), not a different individual with different behavior.
We observed reliability professionals in critical infrastructures undertaking four types of resilience at their system level, each varying by stage of operations in the system:
Table 1. Different Types of System Resilience
- Reliability professionals adjusting back to within de jure or defacto bandwidths to continue normal operations (precursor resilience);
- Restoration from disrupted operations (temporary loss of service) back to normal operations by reliability professionals (restoration resilience);
- Immediate emergency response (its own kind of resilience) after system failure but often involving others different from system’s reliability professionals; and
- Recovery of the system to a new normal by reliability professionals along with others (recovery resilience)
Resilience this way is a set of options, processes and strategies deployed 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 or not the large sociotechnical system is in normal operations versus disrupted operations versus failed operations versus recovered operations. (Again, think of pastoralist systems 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 a “resilient” herder, though such herders exist.
Why does it matter that resilience is a systemwide set of options, processes and strategies? 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 in this day and age, it is their definition of “temporary” that matters when it comes to their real-time reliability.
To return to Table 1, 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. Formally, the precursors of disruption and failure are managed for, and reliably so. Shifting from one watering point, when an interfering problem arises there, to another just as good or within a range of good-enough is one such strategy. Labelling this, “coping,” seriously misrepresents the active system management going on.
Pastoralist systems, nevertheless, can and do experience temporary stoppages in their service provision—raiders seize livestock, remittances don’t arrive, offtake of livestock products is interrupted, random lightning triggers veldt fires—and here the efforts at restoring conditions back to normal is better termed restoration resilience. Access to other grazing areas (or alternative feed stocks or alternative sources of livelihood) may be required in the absence of 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 onward recovery from that failure. In this case, 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.
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 in large sociotechnical systems). It is crucial, nevertheless, to distinguish recovery from the 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 disaster after another.
If you think of resilience in a pastoralist system as “the system’s capability in the face of its high reliability mandates to withstand the downsides of uncertainty and complexity 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.
To summarize, any notion that resilience is a single property or has a dominant definition or is there/not there or is best exemplified at the individual level is incorrect and misleading when system reliability is at stake.
Other 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).
Buchanan, A. (2023). Globalizing the Second World War. Past & Present: A Journal of Historical Studies 258: 246-281.
Bürgisser, R. (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)
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.
WHEN COMPLEX IS AS SIMPLE AS IT GETS 
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