First complicate those for-or-against-pastoralism arguments and then see the policy relevance: four brief examples

–The remittance-sending household member is no more at the geographical periphery of a network whose center is an Africa rangeland than was Austria’s Prince von Metternich in the center of Europe when he said, “Asia begins at the Landstraße” (the district outskirts of Vienna closest to the Balkans).

You can stipulate Asia begins here and Africa ends there, but good luck in making that stick for policies!

(This notion that boundaries change as the units of analysis change would be banal, were it not for this: Both household migrants in Europe and household members in African drylands frequently turn out not to have occupancy rights to where they live and work.)

–It isn’t just that pastoralist households have off-site activities with household members elsewhere who contribute from there to rangeland pastoralist activities.

Rather: It’s more appropriate to say that in some cases a great deal of the pastoralism is done off-rangeland just as what was once platform trading on the floor of a stock exchange is now done elsewhere (as in the case today of the Hong Kong Stock Exchange).

–Isn’t it odd that on one hand, conventional economic growth and its national measurements are excoriated for a wide range of sins (promoting environmental destruction, rising inequalities), and yet the very same nations are excoriated for having marginalized vast portions of their populations by excluding them from that economic growth, and measurably so?

Isn’t it odd that on one hand there are more and more calls for revising macroeconomic statistics because they don’t take into account all manner of labor (e.g., care or digital work), while on the other hand we quite sensibly continue to take seriously measured declines in economic growth in developing countries, even though we all know household labor is under-accounted for there.

It’s as if we’re to assume that excluding Kenya’s Arid and Semi-Arid Lands from the infrastructure development of 1960s economic growth in the Highlands was, well, less deplorable than many of us thought.

–Do you see that disturbing parallel between those who want to save Planet Earth from further harm and pain by means of seductively straightforward “treatments” like getting rid of fossil fuel or methane-producing cattle and, on the other hand, Purdue Pharma’s promotion of OxyContin for reducing chronic pain while masking the lethal addiction to such “straightforward” treatments?