When I first became interested in livestock herders in parts of Africa, I was told they lived on marginal lands (or worse). Half a century later, the repeated refrain is the herders are marginalized–marginalized (or worse) in politics, by the economy, and now because of the climate emergency. I hate that word, “marginal.” Even when pastoralists are commended as models of adaptability, they’re made to sound like hardy little tardigrades–again, marginal–that survive in some of the most hostile environments on the planet.
But marginal does not mean ephemeral. In fact, no matter how seamlessly the depastoralization narratives read, pastoralists just keep on going as a global infrastructure producing options under increasingly uncertain Anthropocene conditions.
Yes, it is true that many pastoralists are pushed to the edge of abandonment by all manner of encroachment and extraction. It is true that many leaders and policymakers keep searching for optimal policies when the multiplicity of pastoralisms require a range of them. To talk of pastoralist development is immediately to talk about a range of strategies. Not just because any one policy has its implementation and execution modified in light of context and case. It is also because we cannot rely on actually dismantling structures and achieving Big-T transformations. Rethinking development in terms of repair, decentering design solutionism, and disrupting urban biases are also needed.
Indeed, we have to go further. For one thing, we shouldn’t be surprised by the huge diversity in pastoralist organizational and network formats for addressing real-time matches between their contingent task demands and contingent capabilities: associations, dedicated government agencies, designated government officers, social movements, catchment areas and planning regions, group ranches and cooperatives, conservancies, coordinators and liaisons, consortia, councils, cross-border committees, NGOs, INGOs, and more. Such diversity is what is to be expected and must be looked for, given the focus on multiple and shifting configurations of interconnectivity.
Nor is it unexpected that a premium is placed on having personal and professional contacts and relationships, since formal and ad hoc structures for organizational and network diversity can only go so far, and not far enough, when it comes to contingent requisite variety. This applies not just to the pastoralists but also to anyone in their networks. A government field officer or headquarters official can also be a mediating, focal player during the disaster and in immediate response thereafter. It is grotesquely misleading to reduce this complexity and diversity to “ethnic politics” or some such rather than the search for requisite variety actually underway.
