The good news in project failure, or: Pastoralism-as-infrastructure is more difficult to assetized than other infrastructures (revised and updated)

Once you start to think of pastoralist systems as a complex infrastructure in its own right and globally so, an sharper 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 aren’t those fabled optimizations of livestock ranches and dairy businesses but rather the fully asssetized “co-living community dwelling sector” with its individual beds to rent and shared work spaces to contract.