As I see it, the benefit of thinking this question in terms of path dependencies (plural) is not only that their durations differ, but the with-respect-to’s are also highly variable. Path dependencies already are commercial or institutional or legal or technological or behavioral or climatic–and more.
I
To my mind, the value-added of First differentiate path dependencies! is considerable. The three most interanimating of importance are:
1. Further differentiation forces attention in environmental crisis management on comparing and contrasting the “with respect to what?” With respect to this as distinct from that path dependency? These versus those? And if so, attention first here rather than there? . . .
2. Further differentiation forces management attention to the specific failure scenarios of interest and the levels of granularity at which the scenarios are said to be actionable. At least two types of failure scenarios are of interest here: those for how the crisis unfolds and those for how the crisis responses fail.
Specifying action-levels of granularity is also important because the answer to the “What happens next?” question so central to on-the-ground crisis management MUST be more than “What happens is, well, more path dependence. . .”
3. This means “cases of interest” must as well be differentiated from the get-go, e.g., “cases out there in reality” as distinct from, say, “the case emerging from your interaction with issues of concern” (Charles Ragin’s typology of cases, for example)
II
So what, practically?
If the question is:
What are reasonable and feasible ways to anticipate future sustainability crises while coping with the ongoing ones?
then my answer derived from the preceding is another question;
If we can’t differentiate path dependencies by better focusing on case-level, variably granular failure scenarios actionable in and for environmental crisis management, how are we ever to better anticipate future sustainability crises while coping with the ongoing ones?
–All the smothering paste of macro-principles and generalizations cannot stop the bubbling up and surfacing of those contingent factors that differentiate inequalities for the purposes of really-existing policymaking and management–societal, political, economic, historical, cultural, legal, geographical, governmental, psychological, neurological, technological, religious, and more.
–So what?
The World Bank estimates over 1.5 billion people globally do not have bank accounts, many being the rural poor. Yet having bank accounts ties us into a global financialized capitalism. What, then, is to have more value? The rural poor with bank accounts or not? Integrated even more into global capitalism or not?
There are, of course, those who insist such is not a binary choice. Surely, though, bank accounts work in some instances and even then differently so.
–Insisting on case-by-case looks to be weak beer. That is, until you realize the self-harm inflicted when political possibilities are foreclosed by policy narrativea that assume the world is everywhere and equally so colonized by capitalisms and their inequalities.
Count me as one long arguing for more in-country researchers to study China’s high-speed rail (HSR)–a system far more ambitious than other nations combined. The aim: to identify HSR practices with respect to system reliability and safety management in the hope of learning more cross-nationally. HSR accidents occur, and big ones, but China’s system is reported to have been managed with high levels of reliability and safety in the last decade.
I
Now I want to suggest extending that research agenda to the management of the interconnections between HSR systems and other major critical infrastructures in China.
HSR is part of China’s transportation network, which has been estimated to also include5 million kilometres of road and 230 major airports. How does HSR interface with them? HSR requires electricity and it’s also reported that China deploys over 275 gigawatts of wind-power capacity, by way of example. What are its interconnections with HSR? HSR includes a great deal of automation and software. Yet according to one source, by the beginning of 2024 only some 40 of the over 235 large language models (LLM) introduced in China had been approved by the regulators. How does the under-regulation of generative AI affect HSR and its other infrastructure interconnections, if at all?
II
The point of the preceding scatter-shot questions is not to highlight the numbers—there must be much better estimates out there–but rather the need for a frameworks centered on infrastructure interconnectivity that guide what sorts of questions to ask and answer in the first place and by way of priority.
As I neither speak nor read Mandarin and am unable to access the research and modeling of Chinese researchers on this matter, I offer below what is hopefully a suggestive alternative: insights from recent research Paul Schulman and I have been undertaking on the interconnected lifeline infrastructures of roads, telecoms, water and electricity.
Combined with earlier research, our framework covers multiple modes of infrastructure operations, including those during normal, disrupted, and failed periods, followed by immediate emergency response and initial service restoration, longer-term recovery, and the establishment of a new normal (if there is to be one),
Below focuses on the framework’s implications for “immediate emergency response and initial service restoration,” a topic of international concern, and not just in China. Of specific focus are “known errors” and “infrastructure vulnerabilities” with respect to that immediate response and restoration. This following three short sections are pitched at a general level, with specifics to China provided by way a short conclusion.
III
To talk about known errors and vulnerabilities to avoid seems incongruous in the context of the pervasive uncertainties found in the midst of major disasters. Real-time surprises and shocks are frequent in flooding, wildfires, earthquakes, and disease outbreaks, among other major disruptions and failures.
Also well-documented, however, is the urgency, clarity and logic about what to do by way of just-in-time interventions in some of these cases. Despite surprises, sequences of action in these instances are clear, urgent and known to front-line staff; and with them, certain errors to be avoided are also evident as well as the vulnerabilities posed if not avoided beforehand. This is especially true when it comes to known sequences with respect to restoring electricity, water, telecoms and roads after, say, an earthquake.
IV
Vulnerabilities arise because the interconnectivities between and among infrastructures, when shifting from latent before an emergency to manifest during and after the disaster, can well invalidate existing response planning and preparedness. The emergency changes or multiplies the range of contacts, communications and negotiations required to produce new and unforeseen options to respond. Where and when so, infrastructures are by definition under-prepared and under-resourced to match their capabilities to their demands.
More specifically with respect to known errors:
Under conditions of such changed interconnectivity, it would be an error for infrastructure operators and emergency managers not to establish lateral communications with one another and undertake improvisational and shared restoration activities where needed, even if no official arrangement exists to do so.
In addition to these front-line errors, there are also errors of anticipation and planning. In particular, it would be a management error not to provide robust and contingent inter-infrastructure communication capabilities, including phone connections between the control rooms of interconnected infrastructures. This communication, it has been demonstrated, is greatly facilitated by establishing lateral inter-infrastructure personnel contacts prior to emergencies
It would also be an error not to have some contingent resources for restoration and initial recovery activities such as lorries, portable generators and movable cell towers in differing locations that would be made available across infrastructures if needed, particularly where chokepoints of interconnected infrastructures are adjacent to each other.
There are other known errors, but the above three are sufficient to draw important implications with regard to inter-infrastructural vulnerabilities to be anticipated before, during and after a disaster.
V
Four of the significant implications are:
1. Avoiding these known errors are not to be equated to “risk management.” Indeed, they should have their very own, different funding sources and programs.
2. That earmarked funding should be allocated to already existing units and organizations focused on interconnectivities between and among infrastructures. In our experience, this means focusing well beyond the official emergency management structures at the local, regional and national levels. Instead, you are looking for existing initiatives that have already “seen the light” by focusing on interconnectivities in their own right and right from the start.
3. Typical discussions of infrastructure vulnerabilities focus on physical components, like corrosion in gas pipelines. The vulnerabilities of interest here, however, begin when the interconnected infrastructures fail to anticipate the need for these special capacities in those cases of shifting or shifted interconnectivities, like the need for lateral communications beyond official channels as a known error to avoid.
4. Without prior contacts, communication channels and contingent resources already in place beforehand, the infrastructures will focus on their own intra-infrastructure priorities, tasks and responsibilities in the emergency. If inter-infrastructural connectivities are instead a priority, real-time corrections are hampered by lack of prior error avoidance and attention.
VI
So what, with respect to China?
Four obvious questions, for which I don’t pretend to have any kind of answer, are:
–Do existing institutions facilitate lateral communications and horizontal micro-coordination even if (especially if) they occur outside official emergency management infrastructures, be they in rural or urban areas?
–Are formal and informal communications systems robust even when baseline telecoms are down, be they in rural or urban areas?
–Are repositories of key infrastructure back-ups readily available, particularly where chokepoints of two or more infrastructures are co-located in urban or rural areas?
–Are existing initiatives focused on vulnerabilities of interconnected infrastructures in the face of urban or rural disasters supported not only by funds and staff, but new information and findings?
Note by this point, in case it needs saying, that in none of this am I suggesting the focus start, let alone, end with the HSR system.
My thanks to Paul Schulman for working out and providing some of the wording . Any errors still remain mine.
1. Thinking infrastructurally about what is not said, but could be, in pastoralist development
(1) “We must fight for the expansion of pastoralism as a universal public infrastructure, just as is now being done for universally available electricity.”
(2) “Government agencies and donors working in pastoralism ask to be overhauled so as to meet pastoralist needs faster and more effectively.”
(3) “Pastoralists explain their responses to government and donor initiatives this way: ‘We corrected your design problems on the ground. Our job as reliability professionals, after all, is to protect you, too.'”
(4) “We herding professionals refuse to play the game conjured up by you outside analysts that starts with your tables and numbers of livestock. Why? Because your follow-on question is almost immediately: ‘But 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 us: ‘What are you going to do about these inequalities?’ And leaving us hardly any time to reply that, well, the most ethical thing in response is to see if there are more useful ways to think about this problem than one starting with livestock owned and held.”
2. Thinking infrastructurally about resilience in pastoralist settings
I
The opposite of the coping herder, who can only react to external shocks, is the resilient herder, who bounces back. But is that true? Both occur at the individual level, but from an infrastructure perspective, the opposite of the individual is something like “team situational awareness” in its control centers, not another individual herder who is “non-resilient.”
We observed the professionals in control rooms of critical infrastructures undertaking four types of resilience at their system level, each varying by stage of system operations:
Table 1. Different Types of System Resilience
Professionals adjusting back to within de jure or de facto bandwidths to continue normal operations (precursor resilience);
Restoration from disrupted operations (temporary loss of service) back to normal operations by the professionals (restoration resilience);
Immediate emergency response (its own kind of resilience) after system failure but often involving other professionals from different from systems; and
Recovery of the system to a new normal by reliability professionals along with others, including new stakeholders (recovery resilience)
Resilience this way is a set of options, processes and strategies undertaken 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 the large sociotechnical system is in normal operations versus disrupted operations versus failed operations versus recovered operations. (Think of pastoralist systems here 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 individual “resilient” herders, though such herders exist.
II
So what?
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 these days, it is the herders’ definition of “temporary” that matters when it comes to their real-time reliability.
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. Shifting from one watering point, when a problem arises there, to another within a range of good-enough fallbacks, is one such strategy. Labelling this, “coping,” seriously misrepresents the active system management going on.
Pastoralist systems can and do experience temporary stoppages in their service provision—raiders seize livestock, remittances don’t arrive, off-take of livestock products is interrupted, lightning triggers a veldt fire—and here the efforts at restoring conditions back to usual is better termed restoration resilience. Access to alternative feed stocks or sources of livelihood may be required in the absence of grazing and watering 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 recovery from that failure. In these circumstances, 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.
III
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). It is crucial, nevertheless, to distinguish recovery from any 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 drought or disaster after another. The reality may be that some systems—not all!—are already at a new normal, operating with a very different combination of options, strategies and resources than before.
If you think of resilience in a pastoralist system as “the system’s capability in the face of its reliability mandates to withstand the downsides of uncertainty 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.
Finally, a mistake to avoid. When response and recovery are difficult to separate or these “stages” occur together, then response and recovery resiliences are also hard to tease apart and separate out. The danger is that “resilience” may be relegated only to the planning for the mitigation of longer-term recovery efforts.
3. Rethinking the role of in-kind transfers in rural and herding settings
I
Three recent entries in Ian Scoones’ blog, Zimbabweland, raise for me a way of rethinking the longstanding notion in pastoralist studies of “in-kind compensation,” now within the current settings.[1]
One entry talks about contributing goats instead of cash to a rural rotational savings group. Another spoke of parents who contribute their management time and skills to rural projects whose laborers are paid by the parents’ children. A third entry talks about people repaying their creditors with tobacco rather than cash.
Those who point to the relentless spread of the cash economy can and do point to herders who were once compensated in the form of, say, a calf or lamb, but are now paid in the monetized form of wages. I want to suggest that the payment-in-kind in the preceding paragraph need not be seen as reversion to past practices because the cash economy has somehow failed, but because in-kind transfers practiced in the past are fit-for-purpose in the cash economy as well.
II
I work in the field of infrastructure studies. A shift from automated (electronic, digital) operations to manual, hands-on operations triggered by an incident is often described as reverting to the older practice or earlier technology. The telemetry shows an automatic shut-off isn’t working; a crew member is sent into the field to turn it on/off by hand or other means.
But it is misleading to think of that example as reversion to past practices. Why? Because the shifts from (more) automated to (more) manual operations are with respect to the today’s system and their standards of system reliability, not the earlier ones. The system in my example hasn’t failed because it resorts to manual operations. Indeed, the latter are instead an essential part of keeping today’s system continuously reliable, even during turbulent events.
III
A perfect example of in-kind transfers having this function in the cash economy comes from one of the blogs: “The flow of food and other agricultural goods (vegetables, meat and so on) from land reform areas is significant, and essential for food security and social protection in urban areas of Zimbabwe, as well as in communal areas where many settlers originally came from.”
If I am reading the blog entry correctly, food security won’t be as reliable as it is without these in-kind transfers–even leaving open the question of whether food security in the past was more or less reliable than now.
IV
But what about rural herders and pastoralists in particular? Of course, there is increased commodification and monetization of practices from the rural past to the rural present. But that is not to the point here.
Even where there are waged herders, it still may be, e.g., women or others provide unpaid labor with respect to caring for pregnant, calving or injured livestock.[2] More generally (and I could be wrong), the persistence of in-kind transfers within a cash economy may be more about local justice than it is about the global injustices of the cash nexus.[3]
4. Thinking infrastructurally about rangeland carrying capacity
I
The key problem in my view with the notion of “rangeland carrying capacity” is the assumption that it’s about livestock. That notion invites you to conjure up livestock shoulder-to-shoulder on a parcel of land and then ask you: How could this not be a physical limit on the number of livestock per unit of land? You can’t pack anymore on it and that has to be a capacity constraint. Right?
Wrong. Livestock numbers on a piece of land are not a system. The number of its pipes, rods and valves are not an operating nuclear power plant. Yes, livestock systems that provide continuous and important services (like meat, milk, wool. . .) have limits. But these limits are set by managing physical constraints, be it LSU/ha or not. More, this management combines with managing other constraints like access to markets, remittances for household members abroad, nearby land encroachment, and much else.
Can herders make management mistakes? Of course. That is why pastoralists-to-pastoralists learning is so important.
From this perspective, it’s not “rangeland carrying capacity” we should be talking about, but “rangeland management capacity”. Or better yet, “rangeland management capacities,” as there is not just one major type of pastoralism, but many different pastoralist systems of production and provision of livestock-related services.
Three recent entries in Ian Scoones’ blog, Zimbabweland, raise for me a way of rethinking the longstanding notion in pastoralist studies of “in-kind compensation,” now within the current settings.[1]
One entry talks about contributing goats instead of cash to a rural rotational savings group. Another spoke of parents who contribute their management time and skills to rural projects whose laborers are paid by the parents’ children. A third entry talks about people repaying their creditors with tobacco rather than cash.
Those who point to the relentless spread of the cash economy can and do point to herders who were once compensated in the form of, say, a calf or lamb, but are now paid in the monetized form of wages. I want to suggest that the payment-in-kind in the preceding paragraph need not be seen as reversion to past practices because the cash economy has somehow failed, but because in-kind transfers practiced in the past are fit-for-purpose in the cash economy as well.
II
I work in the field of infrastructure studies. A shift from automated (electronic, digital) operations to manual, hands-on operations triggered by an incident is often described as reverting to the older practice or earlier technology. The telemetry shows an automatic shut-off isn’t working; a crew member is sent into the field to turn it on/off by hand or other means.
But it is misleading to think of that example as reversion to past practices. Why? Because the shifts from (more) automated to (more) manual operations are with respect to the today’s system and their standards of system reliability, not the earlier ones. The system in my example hasn’t failed because it resorts to manual operations. Indeed, the latter are instead an essential part of keeping today’s system continuously reliable, even during turbulent events.
III
A perfect example of in-kind transfers having this function in the cash economy comes from one of the blogs: “The flow of food and other agricultural goods (vegetables, meat and so on) from land reform areas is significant, and essential for food security and social protection in urban areas of Zimbabwe, as well as in communal areas where many settlers originally came from.”
If I am reading the blog entry correctly, food security won’t be as reliable as it is without these in-kind transfers–even leaving open the question of whether food security in the past was more or less reliable than now.
IV
But what about rural herders and pastoralists in particular? Of course, there is increased commodification and monetization of practices from the rural past to the rural present. But that is not to the point here.
Even where there are waged herders, it still may be, e.g., women or others provide unpaid labor with respect to caring for pregnant, calving or injured livestock.[2] More generally (and I could be wrong), the persistence of in-kind transfers within a cash economy may be more about local justice than it is about the global injustices of the cash nexus.[3]
We show that the rise in the share of immigrants across European regions over the 2010-2019 period had a modest impact on the employment-to-population rate of natives. However, the effects are highly uneven across regions and workers, and over time. First, the short-run estimates show adverse employment effects in response to immigration, while these effects disappear in the longer run. Second, low-educated native workers experience employment losses due to immigration, whereas high-educated ones are more likely to experience employment gains. Third, the presence of institutions that provide employment protection and high coverage of collective wage agreements exert a protective effect on native employment. Finally, economically dynamic regions can better absorb immigrant workers, resulting in little or no effect on the native workforce.
Anthony Edo & Cem Özgüzel (2023). The Impact of Immigration on the Employment Dynamics of European Regions. CEPII Working Paper No. 2023-20. Centre d’Études Prospectives et d’Informations Internationales (CEPII), Paris. (Accessed online at http://www.cepii.fr/CEPII/fr/publications/wp/abstract.asp?NoDoc=13908)
So, to be clear. The last sentence of the new article’s first paragraph is to the effect that: Economically dynamic regions have been found to better absorb immigrant workers, resulting in little or no effect on the native workforce.
Then follows–and this is what I’d really like to see–are the paragraphs setting out the policy and program details on how degrowth in those dynamic regions would work in Europe, given immigration, particularly from Africa, continues even under (especially under?) successful degrowth.
Please note: I am not asking for anything like guarantees with respect to degrowth’s impact on immigration. I am asking for more granular scenarios and more clarity on their assumptions from degrowth advocates. This way I can better separate out informed opinion from the rest.
Although most songwriting teams in the Great American Songbook wrote music first and lyrics second, most studies of music-text interaction in this repertoire still evince a lyrics-first mindset, in which the music is viewed as text-setting. In this article, I propose the opposite approach: considering lyrics as a form of music-setting, in which the lyricist’s superimposition of a verbal form (the rhyme scheme) upon the composer’s pre-existing musical form counts as an act of analysis. . . .
Not all performances from this era make the same changes as Hepburn [Audrey Hepburn singing in the 1957 film Funny Face]. But her performance is nonetheless representative of an evolutionary process that propagates throughout this repertoire: the composer supplies a musical form; the lyricist superimposes a different form above it; and the performer implicitly revises the music to better tally with the lyrics.
For some, it’s the shortcut: Policy is about writing the lyrics, implementation about making those words real, and evaluation about assessing the good and bad in those words and performances.
That policy instead is the music and that implementers are like lyricists trying to find, among many possibilities, an implementation that fits better than others offers a revealing twist. Also revealing is the notion that “fits better” means “fits suggestively” for ongoing interpretations: namely, future evaluations, formal and informal, of the policy-as-implemented are performed in ways that offer up nuanced interpretations of what is seen, heard and done.
Revealing? For one thing, this suggests that the closure posed to policy by its implementation is not once and for all as long as evaluations (interpretations) are ongoing (literally, performed). In this way, repeated evaluation, not implementation on its own, is a de facto policymaking without closure. Or if you will, this is its own kind of democracy.
Sociotechniccal imaginaries have been defined as “collectively held, institutionally stabilized, and publicly performed visions of desirable futures, animated by shared understandings of forms of social life and social order attainable through, and supportive of, advances in science and technology”
Sheila Jasanoff, 2015. Future imperfect: Science, technology, and the imaginations of modernity. In Dreamscapes of modernity: Sociotechnical imaginaries and the fabrication of power, ed. S. Jasanoff and S.-H. Kim, pp. 1–33. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
But then: whose visions? Even within a large sociotechnical system like a critical infrastructure, whose imaginaries?
Clearly not just those of the CEO and the rest of the C-suite. Nor its investors and regulators. Nor policymakers and legislators of concern.
After all, any large sociotechnical system has its equivalent street-level bureaucrats, front-line implementers, and middle level reliability professionals, who have their own visions and facts on the ground in constrast to the others. They are, in fact, often credited with de facto policymaking.
I
An example: Consider the commonplace that regulatory compliance is “the baseline for risk mitigation” in society’s critical infrastructures.
Yet there is no reason to assume that compliance–a sociotechnical imaginary if there ever was one–is the same baseline for, inter alios,
the infrastructure’s operators in the field, including the eyes-and-ears field staff;
the infrastructure’s headquarters’ staff responsible for monitoring industry practices for meeting government compliance mandates;
the senior officials in the infrastructure who see the need for far more than compliance by way of enterprise risk management;
those other infrastructure professionals responsible for thinking through “what-if” scenarios that vary by all manner of contingencies; and, last but not least,
the infrastructure’s reliability professionals—its control room operators, should they exist, and immediate support staff—in the midst of all this, especially in their role of surmounting stickiness by way of official procedures and protocols–the “official” sociotechnical imaginary–undermining real-time system reliability and safety.
II
So what?
These differences in orientation with respect to e.g., “baseline compliance,” mean societal values for systemwide reliability and safety can be just as differentiated and distributed as these staff and their responsibilities are. Where reliable infrastructures matter to a society, it must also be expected that the social values reflected in these infrastructures not only differ across infrastructures but also within them.
1. When interconnections are the center of analysis and management: the case of pastoralist systems and interconnected infrastructures upon which they depend
3. Disaster averted in central to pastoralist development
4. Recasting national policies for pastoralist development
5. Assetizing and securitizing pastoralism-as-infrastructure (longer read)
1. When interconnections are the center of analysis and management: the case of pastoralist systems and interconnected infrastructures upon which they depend
I
We know that, when it comes to livestock grazing (and browsing), many herders (and shepherds) depend on water supplies, road transportation, market facilities and telecommunications.
What added purchase then for pastoralist development is to be had when focusing analysis from the very start on the interconnections between herders (broadly writ) and these infrastructures?
The quick answer: When we shift to focusing on the interconnections between their system and the infrastructures pastoralists rely upon, policy and management implications differ considerably compared to the current focus that starts and ends with the pastoralist system instead.
II
By way of an example, the supply of camel milk for marketing may look like a serial sequence from camel to end-consumer, but a closer look reveals important mediated, pooled and reciprocal interconnectivities.
There may be a focal cooperative that mediates collection and other activities in between. Reciprocities (bi-directional interconnectivity) are evident among cooperative members or women sellers along the road when they mutually assist each other. Their milk is pooled at the plant in order to be processed and then marketed. A sense of this mix of sequential, mediated, reciprocal and pooled is capture in Michele Nori’s description of camel milk marketing (CCM) in Isiolo (2023),
Milk produced under these [pastoralist] systems reaches Isiolo through sophisticated supply networks supported by rural collectors and motor-bike transporters (boda boda). These community networks exist and operate in a variety of forms and patterns, and they reconfigure as conditions vary. At the heart of the networks, there are few companies based in Isiolo town, managed by women and characterised by different ethnic configurations, market management and institutional arrangements. A significant number of the women members of the CMM companies are members of camel keeping families. . .We describe now the Isiolo model through the lens of the largest CMM operating company, Anolei. It is quite popular amongst research and development agencies, and we will assess then the other existing networks based on their differences with respect to it. The Anolei cooperative started its activities in the late 1990s (few hundred litres a day) as a self- help women group of (mostly) Garre and Somali women who had recently come to reside in Isiolo (Adjuran and Degodya clans). It was formalised as a cooperative in 2010, also to facilitate access to international support and financing; counts in 2021 found about 90 members, although the figure of active operators changes from one season to another.
What’s so important, you ask, about the interconnectivities of milk marketing, e.g., with respect to roads, and their configurations?
The answer is less one of identifying specific or “characteristic” configurations than focusing on the variably and visible shifts as an indicator of significant operational changes, inter-infrastructurally.
III
A different example illuminates the importance of those shifts.
Transhumant herds and herders moving across the borders of adjacent countries have been depicted as real-time herd requirements overlapping with real-time national security concerns. But the focus on sudden shifts–e.g., the relatively recent policy shift of the Uganda government to ensuring Turkana grazers are unarmed when moving from Kenya to better pastures across the border–suggests that there may be a great deal of improvisational behavior–on-site bargaining or context-specific arrangements–going at and across the borders.
Indeed, a major function of these ad hoc, time- and site-specific arrangements (all be they unrecorded) is to bridge, in real time and unofficially, the unavoidable duality of stationary borders and mobile herders in pastoralist policy and management.
IV
So what?
The demand for requisite variety is familiar to experienced infrastructure professionals, including pastoralists: the need to increase real-time options, strategies and resources so as to better match the requirements of unpredictable or uncontrollable conditions.
Requisite variety is the principle that it takes some complexity to manage complexity. If a problem has many variables and can assume a diversity of different conditions or states, it takes a variety of management options to address this complexity. Uncontrollable/unpredicted changes in system inputs have to be transform into a smaller range of managed states.
Having a diversity of resource and strategic options, including being able to assemble, improvise or invent them, is a way to match and manage problem complexity with a variety of capabilities. This is especially important when the improvisations center around overlapping or shared system control variables, such as common grazing lands. Think also of rural people coming together to manage the vehicle transportation of water deliveries because of a sudden worsening in the drought or because, e.g., a major rangeland fire has occurred nearby.
V
But what then are some of the policy and management implications?
For one thing, we shouldn’t be surprised by the huge diversity in organizational and network formats for addressing real-time matches between 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 chalk up the latter as “ethnic politics” rather than the search for requisite variety actually underway.
Herbert, S. and I. Birch (2022). Cross-border pastoral mobility and cross-border conflict in Africa –patterns and policy responses. XCEPT Evidence Synthesis. Birmingham, UK: GSDRC, University of Birmingham
Krätli, S, et al (2022). Pastoralism and resilience of food Production in the face of climate change. Background Technical Paper. Bonn: Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ)
Schürmann, A., J. Kleemann, M. Teucher, C. Fürst, and C. Conrad (2022). Migration in West Africa: a visual analysis of motivation, causes, and routes. Ecology and Society 27(3):16
Unks, R., M. Goldman, F. Mialhe, Y. Gunnell, and C. Hemingway (2023). Diffuse land control, shifting pastoralist institutions, and processes of accumulation in southern Kenya, The Journal of Peasant Studies
The great virtue of political ecology, in my view, has been to complexify narratives that “scarcity-of-this-or-this-sort leads to land-use conflict.” I suggest that even the more nuanced, multi-causal explanations can be pushed and pulled further.
In particular, I’m not sure that “conflict,” after a point, helps or aids better pastoralist policy and development. In no way should the following be construed as criticism of those writing on land-use conflicts nor is my contribution a justification for killing people. I suggest only that there may be a different way of interpreting what is going on, and if there is, then there may be other ways even better to productively rethink the policy issues involved.
To that end, I use two lenses from the framework in my 2020 STEPS paper.
II
The first is that logic of requisite variety. 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 differentiated from the get-go. By way of example, references to pastoralist raids, skirmishes and flare-ups that do not identify “with-respect-to” what inputs, processes or outputs are bound to be very misleading.
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). By way of example, some discussion of jihadist raids by young pastoralist men in the Sahel seems to reflect the changing composition and level of variance around the outputs and outcomes (as if there was something like “young-men pastoralism” whose outputs had been changed by or with jihadism).
So what?
It 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, a livestock raid (or such) is more than a livestock raid.
III
The second lens to refocus land-use conflicts is the entire cycle of infrastructure operations. 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 immediate emergency response to having the entire system of operations or herd disappear because of some systemwide calamity.
As for those jihadist inspired and supported raids by young pastoralist men, it’s important to determine if those raids are best understood as recovery efforts to a new normal (recovery of a failed system is much more inter-organizationally demanding–think conventional humanitarian aid—than service restoration after a temporary disruption by the system on its own). Much of the current literature on the plight of pastoralists seems as well to be equating recurring pastoralist recoveries after failures as its new normal.
IV
Again: So what?
As with the logic of requisite variety, the whole cycle requires those involved in pastoralist development to first differentiate cases of “land-use conflict” before proposing or adopting policy interventions. It isn’t merely about that old nostrum: Conflict can be productive, not destructive. Rather, “land-use conflicts” are fundamentally different cases of different lands, different uses and different conflicts.
A “conflict” going on for 30 years or more is obviously one that pushes and pulls to center-stage both the full cycle of pastoralist operations across time and the logic of requisite variety at any point in time for transforming input variability into sustained (though over time changing) outputs and outcomes.
3. Disaster-averted is central to pastoralist development
I
My argument is that if crises averted by pastoralists were identified and more differentiated, we’d better understand how far 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 infrastructure 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. Why? Because we are told that ultimately what matters far more are the infrastructure disasters of modernization, late capitalism, and environmental collapse destructive of everything in their path.
Even where the latter is true, that truth must be pushed further to incorporate the importance of disasters-averted-now. Disaster averted matters to herders precisely because herders actively dread specific disasters, whatever the root causes.
II
Of course, inequality, marketization, commodification, precarity and other related processes matter for pastoralists and others. The same for modernization, late capitalism, global environmental destruction, and the climate emergency. But they matter when differentiated and better specified in terms of their “with respect to.”
Just what is marketization with respect to in your case? Smallstock? Mechanized transportation? Alpine grazing? Is it in terms of migrant herders here rather than there, or with respect to other types of livestock or grazing conditions? How do the broader processes collapsed under “marketization” get redefined by the very different with-respect-to’s?
Most important, appeals to generalized processes or state conditions diminish 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 demonstrate how these broad processes preoccupy real time because herders have failed to avert dreaded events altogether. Without the empirical work showing that no disasters have been averted by pastoralists, the appeal to broad structural explanations begins to look less as a denial of human agency than the idealization of the absence of agency, irrespective of the facts on the ground.
III
Let me give an example. Andrew Barry, British sociologist, reports a finding in his article, “What is an environmental problem?,” from his research in Georgia:
A community liaison officer, working for an oil company, introduced me to a villager who had managed to stop the movement of pipeline construction vehicles near her mountain village in the lesser Caucasus. The construction of the pipeline, she told us in conversation, would prevent her moving livestock between two areas of pastureland. Her protest, which was the first she had ever been involved in, was not recorded in any official or public documents.
Barry found this to be a surprising research event (his terms) and went on to explain at length (internal citations deleted) that
my conversation with the villager pointed to the importance of a localized problem, the impact of the pipeline on her livelihood and that of other villagers, and her consequent direct action, none of which is recorded or made public. This was one of many small, fragmentary indicators that alerted me to the prevalence and significance of direct action by villagers across Georgia in the period of pipeline construction, actions that were generally not accorded significance in published documents, and that were certainly not traceable on the internet. . .At the same time, the mediation of the Georgian company liaison officer who introduced me to the villager was one indicator of the complexity of the relations between the local population, the oil company, and the company’s subcontractors. . .
I believe the phrases, “managed to stop,” “would prevent her moving livestock,” “a localized problem,” “consequent direct action,” “generally not accorded significance,” and “the complexity of the relations” are the core to understanding that disasters-averted remain very real, even if not identified, let alone publicized, by outsiders preoccupied with what hasn’t been averted.
Should it need saying, some with-respect-to scenarios do specify how such phrases result from an ongoing interaction and dialectic between the wider processes and local particularities. I’d hope, though, you’d want to see details behind any such assertion first.
IV
So what? How does the argued importance of disasters-averted compel rethinking pastoralist development? One example will have to suffice: the need to recast “pastoralist elites.”
I recently read a fine piece mentioning today’s Pokot elites and Turkana elders in Kenya. 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.”
My question then: Under what conditions do pastoralists, initially poor but today better off, become elites in the negative sense familiar to the critics of elites? The answer is important because an over-arching development aim of the 1980s arid and semi-arid lands programs in Kenya was to assist then-poor pastoralists to become better-off.
My own answer to the preceding question would now focus on the disasters averted over time by pastoralists, both those who are today’s elites and those who aren’t. It seems to me essential to establish if equally (resource-) poor pastoralists nonetheless differentiated themselves over time in terms of how they averted disasters that would have befell them had they not managed 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, the refocusing on disasters-averted over time holds for those who were not advantaged then but are so now.
Which leads me to the question that should be obvious to any reader: Since when are researchers to decide that time stops sufficiently in a study period to certify who among herders are advantaged going forward, let alone what are the metrics for determining such? When did the development narrative become “poor herders and farmers must advance at the same rate or even faster than advantaged ones?”
Sources
Barry, A. (2020). What is an environmental problem? In the special issue, “Problematizing the Problematic,” Theory, Culture & Society: 1 – 25.
4. Recasting national policies for pastoralist development
I propose to categorize policies according to their intended goal into a three-fold typology: (i) compensation policies aim to buffer the negative effects of technological change ex-post to cope with the danger of frictional unemployment, (ii) investment policies aim to prepare and upskill workers ex-ante to cope with structural changes at the workplace and to match the skill and task demands of new technologies, [and] (iii) steering policies treat technological change not simply as an exogenous market force and aim to actively steer the pace and direction of technological change by shaping employment, investment, and innovation decisions of firms.
This epigraph focuses specifically on the how to think about policies that better respond to effects of automation on displacing workers.
Please re-read the excerpt and then undertake the following thought experiment.
I
Imagine it is pastoralists who are being displaced from their usual herding workplaces, in this case by land encroachment, sedentarization, climate change, mining, or other largely exogenous factors.
The question becomes what are the compensation, investment and steering policies of government, among others, to address this displacement. That is, where are the policies to: (1) compensate herders for loss of productive livelihoods, (2) upskill herders in the face of eventually losing their current employment, and (3) efforts to steer the herding economies and markets in ways that do not lose out if and where new displacement occurs?
The answer? With the odd exception that proves the rule, no such national policies exist.
II
Yes, of course, there are the NGO, donor project, and local department trying to work along these lines. But one has to ask at this conjuncture in development history whether their existence is the excuse government uses for avoiding having to undertake such policies, regionally or nationally.
III
A more productive exercise might be to ask: How would various existing pro-pastoralist interventions be classified: as compensatory, as investment, and/or as steering?
It seems to me that many of the pro-pastoralist interventions fall under the rubric of “steering policies”. The aim is to keep pastoralists who are already there, there–and better off in some regards. Better veterinary measures, paravets and mobile teachers that travel with the herding households, real-time marketing support, mobile health clinics, restocking programs as and when needed, better water point management and participation, and the like are offered up as ways to improve herding livelihoods in the arid and semi-arid lands.
IV
Fair enough, but not far enough, right? For where are the corresponding compensation and investment policies?
Where, for example, are the policy interventions for improving and capitalizing on re-entry of remittance-sending members back into pastoralism if and when they return home? Where are the national policies to compensate farmers for not encroaching further on pastoralist lands, e.g., by increasing investments on the agricultural land they already have? Where are the national (and international) policies that recognize keeping the ecological footprint of pastoralist systems is far less expensive than that of urban and peri-urban infrastructures?
Or for that matter and more proactively:
1. Start with the EU’s Emission Trading System for CO2 emission credits. Imagine member/non-member states and companies are now able to enter the ETS to buy credits directed to offsetting GHG emissions in dryland localities committed to transitioning to environmentally friendly production systems and livelihoods based in or around livestock.
2. Start with the European COVID-19 initiative, NextGenerationEU (issuance of joint debt by EU member states to fund pandemic recovery). Imagine employee support schemes under this or some such initiative, with one aim being to augment remittances of resident migrants back to dryland household members and communities.
3. Stay with those resident migrants sending back remittances. Imagine other EU-financed schemes to improve the greening of EU localities heavily resident with migrants (e.g. subsidies to EU residents for more sustainable lifestyles in the EU). Think of this as a form of “reversed green extractivism,” in this case on behalf of dryland households by EU member states for EU-migrant communities.
Once you start to think of pastoralist systems as complex infrastructures in their own right and globally so, a useful contrast emerges:
While many 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 financially stabler returns.
My argument here is that pastoralism-as-infrastructure is better able to resist elements of those latter elements of financialization, precisely because they pastoralist systems are not traditional in the sense of the ruling elites of techno-managers and politicians.
Yes, pastoralists have assets, but assets as resources in pastoralism existed long before capitalism (see Sonenscher 2022). Indeed, assetization as ongoing processes of enclosure and property do not necessarily entail financialization (see McArthur 2023). Nor do commodification, marketization and even financialization never provide affordances for poorer households such as herders (see Zaloom and James 2023). Really-existing pastoralisms remain very much mixed systems and highly differentiated, with important policy and management implications.
Let’s examine these points in more detail, starting with describing how pastoralist systems can be viewed as infrastructural and then moving onto the issues and implications of its assetization.
Pastoralism as infrastructure and initial implications
I
While vastly different technologically, the critical infrastructures with which I am familiar–water, energy, telecoms, transportation, hazardous liquids–share the same operational logic: The system’s real time operators seek to increase process variance (in terms of diverse options, resources, strategies) in the face of high input variance (including variability in factors of production and climate) to achieve low and stable output variance (electricity, water and telecoms provided safely and continuously).
Again, we are back to the logic of requisite variety. Having a diversity of resource and strategic options, including being able to assemble, improvise or invent them, is a way to match and manage problem complexity so as to achieve by and large stable outputs.
I submit pastoralist systems are, in respect to this logic, infrastructural; and as pastoralists and their systems are found worldwide, so too is pastoralism a global infrastructure. To be sure, not all pastoralist systems share this logic; nor are all pastoralists real-time reliability professionals; nor do all pastoralist systems reduce to this logic, only.
II
If we focus on the set of pastoralist systems that share the logic, the implications for rethinking pastoralist development are, I believe, major. To pick four of the differences identified in earlier blogs:
1. The infrastructure perspective suggests that instead of talking about environmental risks associated with pastoralism (e.g., the climate risks of land degradation and methane production), we should be comparing the environmental footprints produced by the respective global infrastructures (e.g., roads globally, electricity globally, dams globally. . .).
Because pastoralisms rely on these other infrastructures, the respective footprints overlap. But the physical damage done to the environment by roads, dams, and power plants are well documented and demonstrably extend well far beyond pastoralist usage.
2. No large critical infrastructures can run 24/7/365 at 100% capacity and be reliable, and pastoralist systems are no different. This means comparing pastoralist livestock systems to a benchmark of “optimized” grassland ranching or intensive dairy production is ludicrous, if only because the latter are more likely headed to disaster anyway.
3. Restocking schemes are routinely criticized for returning livestock to low-resource rangelands. Yet the infrastructure for government commodity buffer stocks (e.g., holding grain, wool or oil in order to stabilize the prices of those commodities) are routinely recommended by other experts, decade after decade, be the countries low-resource or not.
4. When was the last time you heard pastoralist livestock exports from the world’s arid and semi-arid regions being praised for this: Reducing the global budget for virtual water trading from what it could have been. And yet, that is exactly what pastoralism as a global infrastructure does.
Assetizing pastoralisms as infrastructure
I
Think of assets and assetization as follows:
An asset is both a resource and property, in that it generates income streams with its sale price based on the capitalization of those revenues. Although an asset’s income streams can be financially sliced up, aggregated, and speculated upon across highly diverse geographies, there still has to be something underpinning these financial operations. Something has to generate the income that a political economic actor can lay claim to through a property or other right, entailing a process of enclosure, rent extraction, property formation, and capitalization. . . .
Commodities are produced for sale, and as such their value is defined by the labour imbued in them as they are substitutable and subject to laws of competition. In resting on rent and enclosure without a particular orientation towards sale, assetization instead involves “the transformation of things into resources which generate income without a sale”. . . .
The market value of an asset depends on the estimated future rents it will afford, so for there to be a market for rent-bearing property the purchaser must borrow against future rent and capital gains. It is only after this capitalization that there is a viable market for tradable rent-bearing property and, therein, an asset.
That rent-bearing aspect of assetization is often identified separately as securitization or financialization. As the above quote and its authors underscore, such assetization is a more nuanced, meso-or-lower-level concept than are macro notions like that of global capitalism.
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. We may debate the history of doing so. My view is that the path dependency with respect to assets-thinking originated in the division of labor in earlier pastoralist societies as pre-capitalist commercial economies (think: trade routes and the early-on division between herd owners–anachronistically, “rent-seeking,” and their herd holders). Whatever, the variety of capitalist economies has subsequently ramped up the diversity of assetization and securitization within and across pastoralist systems.
II
But the point here is that diversity. Has pastoralism as a global infrastructure been assetized and securitized as fully as the other infrastructures described in the literature? More formally, has the logic of requisite variety with respect to input/process/output variability become a set of assets from which to realize profits and rents? “Not entirely–and significantly so” is my answer to both.
For example, the treatment of “human capital” seeks to assetize a rich process variance in pastoralism as infrastructure. You would have to be sycophants of economics not to see that reification of real-time management of process variance into “investments” does a great disservice to meso- and micro-level differentiation of practices with respect to options, resources and strategies, especially their real time versions.
It’s also easy to continue with such examples and questions by returning to points #1 – #4 and showing how “assetization” in those areas are underway yet in very complex ways.
Livestock and water become “ecological footprints,” a very different asset. Grassland systems as assets are not one-to-one with those in ranching schemes or the dairy sector. As for restocking schemes, it requires a different perspective to see them as part and parcel of commodity stock buffers. And yes, virtual water trading is assetized, but here too the assets in question differ considerably from those conventionally talked about in pastoralist systems.
Conclusion: So what?
I am suggesting that pastoralism as a global infrastructure resists assetization and securitization in ways that are, ironically, criticized by pastoralist advocates.
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 specific rents and profits over time. Critics understandably see these developments in negative terms.
If so, why then are the critics casting in overwhelming negative terms those persistent failures and difficulties in establishing–read: assetizing and securitizing–fixed-point pastoralist schools, permanent health facilities, pacified zones free of armed conflict, and large livestock development projects?
Where some of these “failures” are in fact those of having prevented full-scale assetization and securitization, how is that a failure of pastoralism as its own functioning infrastructure? A threat to pastoralist resistance, perhaps, but when these fixed-point interventions do fail, they fail only in the sense their government and NGO advocates should have known better anyway.
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 wholly or considerably turbulent by virtue of sudden changes in exchange rates and interest rates?
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). In addition to the quote, this article provided two examples.
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)
This paper provides many details and examples of input, process and output variance. It also provides the basis for the above five entries to build upon and extend the reliability professionals framework.
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.
Zaloom, C. and D. James (2023). “Financialization and the Household.” Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 52: 399–415 (https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-anthro-052721-100947). Note a repeated finding of theirs: “Writing against the financialization of daily life framework, which implies a one-way, top-down intrusion of the market into intimate relations, we explore how householders use finance within systems of social obligations. Financial and household value are not opposed, we argue” (p. 399; also pp. 400, 403, 406, and 410).
We know that, when it comes to livestock grazing (and browsing), many herders (and shepherds) depend on water supplies, road transportation, market facilities and telecommunications.
What added purchase then for pastoralist development is to be had when focusing analysis from the very start on the interconnections between herders (broadly writ) and these infrastructures?
The quick answer: When we shift to focusing on the interconnections between their system and the infrastructures pastoralists rely upon, policy and management implications differ considerably compared to the current focus that starts and ends with the pastoralist system instead.
II
By way of an example, the supply of camel milk for marketing may look like a serial sequence from camel to end-consumer, but a closer look reveals important mediated, pooled and reciprocal interconnectivities.
There may be a focal cooperative that mediates collection and other activities in between. Reciprocities (bi-directional interconnectivity) are evident among cooperative members or women sellers along the road when they mutually assist each other. Their milk is pooled at the plant in order to be processed and then marketed. A sense of this mix of sequential, mediated, reciprocal and pooled is capture in Michele Nori’s description of camel milk marketing (CCM) in Isiolo (2023),
Milk produced under these [pastoralist] systems reaches Isiolo through sophisticated supply networks supported by rural collectors and motor-bike transporters (boda boda). These community networks exist and operate in a variety of forms and patterns, and they reconfigure as conditions vary. At the heart of the networks, there are few companies based in Isiolo town, managed by women and characterised by different ethnic configurations, market management and institutional arrangements. A significant number of the women members of the CMM companies are members of camel keeping families. . .We describe now the Isiolo model through the lens of the largest CMM operating company, Anolei. It is quite popular amongst research and development agencies, and we will assess then the other existing networks based on their differences with respect to it. The Anolei cooperative started its activities in the late 1990s (few hundred litres a day) as a self- help women group of (mostly) Garre and Somali women who had recently come to reside in Isiolo (Adjuran and Degodya clans). It was formalised as a cooperative in 2010, also to facilitate access to international support and financing; counts in 2021 found about 90 members, although the figure of active operators changes from one season to another.
What’s so important, you ask, about the interconnectivities of milk marketing, e.g., with respect to roads, and their configurations?
The answer is less one of identifying specific or “characteristic” configurations than focusing on the variably and visible shifts as an indicator of significant operational changes, inter-infrastructurally.
III
A different example illuminates the importance of those shifts.
Transhumant herds and herders moving across the borders of adjacent countries have been depicted as real-time herd requirements overlapping with real-time national security concerns. But the focus on sudden shifts–e.g., the relatively recent policy shift of the Uganda government to ensuring Turkana grazers are unarmed when moving from Kenya to better pastures across the border–suggests that there may be a great deal of improvisational behavior–on-site bargaining or context-specific arrangements–going at and across the borders.
Indeed, a major function of these ad hoc, time- and site-specific arrangements (all be they unrecorded) is to bridge, in real time and unofficially, the unavoidable duality of stationary borders and mobile herders in pastoralist policy and management.
IV
So what?
The demand for requisite variety is familiar to experienced infrastructure professionals, including pastoralists: the need to increase real-time options, strategies and resources so as to better match the requirements of unpredictable or uncontrollable conditions.
Requisite variety is the principle that it takes some complexity to manage complexity. If a problem has many variables and can assume a diversity of different conditions or states, it takes a variety of management options to address this complexity. Uncontrollable/unpredicted changes in system inputs have to be transform into a smaller range of managed states.
Having a diversity of resource and strategic options, including being able to assemble, improvise or invent them, is a way to match and manage problem complexity with a variety of capabilities. This is especially important when the improvisations center around overlapping or shared system control variables, such as common grazing lands. Think also of rural people coming together to manage the vehicle transportation of water deliveries because of a sudden worsening in the drought or because, e.g., a major rangeland fire has occurred nearby.
V
But what then are some of the policy and management implications?
For one thing, we shouldn’t be surprised by the huge diversity in organizational and network formats for addressing real-time matches between 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 chalk up the latter as “ethnic politics” rather than the search for requisite variety actually underway.
Other sources
Herbert, S. and I. Birch (2022). Cross-border pastoral mobility and cross-border conflict in Africa –patterns and policy responses. XCEPT Evidence Synthesis. Birmingham, UK: GSDRC, University of Birmingham
Krätli, S, et al (2022). Pastoralism and resilience of food Production in the face of climate change. Background Technical Paper. Bonn: Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ)
Schürmann, A., J. Kleemann, M. Teucher, C. Fürst, and C. Conrad (2022). Migration in West Africa: a visual analysis of motivation, causes, and routes. Ecology and Society 27(3):16
Unks, R., M. Goldman, F. Mialhe, Y. Gunnell, and C. Hemingway (2023). Diffuse land control, shifting pastoralist institutions, and processes of accumulation in southern Kenya, The Journal of Peasant Studies
WHEN COMPLEX IS AS SIMPLE AS IT GETS 