I
200 million to 500 million pastoralist herders in the world is a very large number, and very large numbers have distributions ranging from those doing better to those doing worse than average. It’s fair then to ask those who argue that pastoralist societies are changing for the worse, which ones in the distribution of pastoralist societies are “getting it (more) right,” from the perspective(s) of the critics.
The fact is that no one, let alone those insisting pastoralist societies are being depastoralized by forces beyond their control, has an overall understanding of the empirical distribution of pastoralist societies worldwide. Instead, “our critical project is to increase understanding of those pastoralist societies we study.”
And significant advances have been made in that understanding. Clearly, there have been pastoralist societies which have ceased to practice any variety of pastoralism. Persistently failing development projects, misleading assumptions about pastoralist behavior, and basically wrong middle-level theories (think the Tragedy of the Commons in light of the subsequent Common Property Resource Management case material) are now a shared knowledge, and continue to be so even though incentives remain among donors and governments to ignore it.
II
But there are problems with “our critical project is to increase understanding of pastoralist societies.” First, if there were ever a Eurocentric idea it is that one. It’s passing odd when critics of Eurocentrism commit themselves to increased understanding and reflection tout court.
Second, it’s no news that others, including pastoralists themselves, want more by way of response and action from better understanding. Where are the counternarratives upon which to base better policy and management not only to “pastoralists are backwards and therefore [sic] in need to techno-managerial solutions”, but also to ”pastoralist societies are being depastoralized” by all manner of wider processes including commodification, marketization, financialization, settler colonialism, nationalism, militarism, racism, marginalization, the climate emergency, and always-late capitalism? As the common property resource management narrative is no longer sufficient to base some policy and management, what are the robust alternatives?
Third, those counternarratives have to be at the level of actionable granularity rather than de rigueur calls for big-T transformations, whose details are to be left to, well, the low and mean cunning of others who know better than the critics how to get their hands dirty. It’s also more than passing odd that those who rightly fault government policies and projects should at the same time not develop counternarrative policies and strategies to test and validate their increased understanding of what is actually underway on the ground.
III
Some already know and act upon the above, but still: So what?
It seems to me that we are at a conjuncture similar to that Elinor Ostrom and her colleagues found themselves in at the 1985 Annapolis Conference on Common Property Resource Management. There she worked with researchers who had presented case material finding too many empirical and policy shortfalls in the Tragedy of Commons and government rural management policies.
From that conference and subsequent work came her counternarrative for which she later won the Nobel Prize in the misnamed field of economic sciences. Today, we need other pastoralism counternarratives, and even researchers focusing exclusively on the depastoralization of pastoralist societies presumably can esteem that challenge, which she also met.
