Abstract
The framework for pastoralists as reliability professionals and pastoralism-as-infrastructure (Roe 2020a) is updated and new findings are presented. Rethinking relations, interactions and processes in pastoralist policy and management are a global prerequisite in light of the priority-setting UN International Year of Rangelands and Pastoralists 2026.
Introduction
It’s a truism that interconnected processes of climate change, inequality, marketization, and precarity matter for pastoralists. This holds as well for modernization, capitalism, and urbanization. But they matter for policy and management purposes only when differentiated further in terms of their “with respect to what.”
Just what is marketization with respect to in the case before us? Marketized small-stock? Mechanized transportation? Alpine grazing? Is the with regards to in terms of immigrant herders here rather than there, or with respect to totally different livestock grazing conditions? How do the processes under “marketization” get recast by their different settings, not least of which are the highly variable conditions of local or regional climate change?
This matters because appeals to processes generalized out of the actionable granularities of context diminish the centrality of disasters actually averted by pastoralists. The diminishment leaves us to assume that marketization, commodification, precarity. . .are the chronic crises of real time for pastoralists. 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 their own dreaded events altogether. These italics are meant to underscore the foundational importance of identifying and differentiating relations, interactions and transdisciplinary comparisons for drawing any such conclusion.
Point of Departure, with Initial Example & Implications
The starting point in this recasting of pastoralist development is the argument that if the disasters and crises actually averted by diverse pastoralists were identified, we would better understand how far short of a fuller picture is equating their real time to the chronic crises of inequality, market failure, climate change and such.
An introductory illustration is helpful. Sociologist, Andrew Barry (2021) reports a finding 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. (Ibid, p. 103)
Barry found this to be surprising (his term) and went on to explain 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. . . (Ibid, p.104; internal citations deleted)
I believe the phrases, “complexity of relations,” “managed to stop,” “would prevent her moving livestock,” “a localized problem,” “consequent direct action,” and “generally not accorded significance,” are core to understanding that disasters-averted remain very real and productive, even if not identified by outsiders preoccupied with what hasn’t been averted.
When disasters averted are not highlighted and instead disasters not averted take up most or all the analysis, we end up with those development caricatures of pastoralist life-worlds depastoralized, degraded, and demeaned, no more than corpse-pastoralism, flogged by conflicts, mummified by inequalities, buried at sea in waves of liquid modernity, dissolved by the quicklime of always-late capitalism, and harboring only worse to come under under climate change.
There remains an important transdisciplinary comparison often missed in these negative narratives. Any avoidance in identifying and accounting for the very real disasters averted 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 if they hadn’t managed. So too disaster-averted matters to herders because herders dread specific events that can and do happen and actively seek to avoid rather than tolerate them. It is important, I argue, to see pastoralist systems infrastructurally for this very reason.
What follows is an update of a 2020 approach to recasting today’s seemingly intractable issues of pastoralist development. First, the multiple lines of argument are summarized (particulars and sources on the framework for pastoralists as reliability professionals and pastoralisms as a global infrastructure are in [Roe 2020a]). The section thereafter illustrates the value added of the framework in terms of two topics taking on increased importance in the Anthropocene: rethinking resilience in pastoralists systems, and recasting major policy and management implications. New material is presented for both topics above and beyond that discussed in Roe (2020a).
Summary of Framework’s Lines of Argument
This focus on averting disasters and its centrality for pastoralists is framed in terms of six inter-related lines of argument:[1]
1. In contemporary societies, large-scale water and energy infrastructures, among others, seek to provide the safe and continuous supply of their vital services to participants, even during (especially during) turbulent times. They seek to preclude or otherwise avoid dreaded events. This is called their high reliability mandate. So too pastoralist systems seek to reliably provide outputs and services vital to their respective participants.
2. Pastoralist systems share specific features that characterize large-scale sociotechnical systems called critical infrastructures and their provision of energy or water, for example. The key one is the role, practices and processes of real-time operators in managing for system-wide reliability. Such reliability professionals are also to be found in pastoralist systems, today and in the past. As pastoralist systems are found across the world, pastoralism can be viewed as a global infrastructure with its own reliability professionals.
3. As with other globalised or globalising infrastructures, pastoralist systems seek to increase process variance—real-time management strategies and options—in the face of high, but unpredictable or uncontrollable input variance, so as to achieve low and stable output variance—and in these ways sustain livelihoods based on a reliable flow of outputs and services.
4. This means that to provide stable supplies of services vital to society, critical infrastructures have had to enlarge their portfolio of management strategies and options to respond effectively to the increased and changing variability in their inputs brought about by, among other factors, changing climate, globalization, and the intensified competition and expansion of markets and commodification. These are the very same pressures and interactions documented at work in and on pastoralist systems.
5. It is this logic of high input variance matched by high process variance to ensure low and stable output variance that characterizes what reliability professionals do. One may ask: “What is ‘pastoralist’ when a herding household must rely on the support of urban or out-of-country members?” In answer, what has not changed is the logic of the reliability management in terms of input, process and output variance. The search for highly reliable pastoralisms persists via new relations and interactions.
Let’s pause for a moment with these five points. While vastly different in sociotechnical terms, the critical infrastructures with which I am familiar — water, energy, telecoms, marine and road transportation, hazardous liquids — share the same 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, during turbulent times).
Core to managing system reliability are these reliability professionals, who by virtue of their skills in pattern recognition and scenario formulation, are able to translate the systemwide patterns they see and the local scenarios they face into real-time reliability across the system. In this way, they have unique knowledge of the system. (Think here of “team situational awareness,” i.e., a group or networks of herders/pastoralists with real-time understanding of the system and its specifics).
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. More, it is easy to assemble toxic narratives around these five lines of argument. Just assert: herders as reliability professionals are disappearing all over the place; and more pastoralists than ever before are left with no option but to cope reactively rather than manage and improvise. Not only do I argue that any such conclusion has to be established case by case (and it hasn’t)—I submit instead my sixth and last line of argument:
6. The overall point is that pastoralist systems tender the world a key critical service (and have been doing so for quite some time): These systems, like other globalized or globalizing infrastructures, seek to increase process variance in the face of high input variance so as to achieve low and stable output variance. More, they do so by managing non-measurable uncertainties well beyond the capabilities of formal risk methodologies and in the face of unfolding and diversified input variabilities. This key service is best understood as foundational to the world economy in Anthropocene times of great uncertainty and turbulence.
Such is my granular policy narrative of “relations,” “interactions,” “processes” and “networks” as a relational approach (for other examples, see Konaka, Semplici and Little 2023). Here the approach focuses on specific relations (i.e., inputs/processes/ outputs), specific interactions (i.e., increasing process variance), key processes (i.e., complex systems require complex responses from their members), and networks (i.e., of reliability professionals).
But: So what? What practical value is added to our understanding of pastoralist systems and the policy and management implications that follow? Below are two new examples of rethinking pastoralism systems in terms of the framework just presented.
Results of Framework Application in Two Key Topic Areas
1. Thinking infrastructurally about resilience in pastoralist systems
The opposite of the coping herder, who can only react to external shocks, is the resilient herder, who bounces back from the same. But, even where true, does that go far enough? Both occur at the individual level, but the opposite of the individual is the collective (think “team situation awareness”), not a different individual with different behavior.
We observed reliability professionals in critical infrastructures undertaking four types of resilience at their system level, each varying by stage of operations in the system:
Table 1. Different Types of System Resilience
- Reliability 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 reliability professionals (restoration resilience);
- Immediate emergency response (its own kind of resilience) after system failure but often involving others different from system’s reliability professionals; and
- Recovery of the system to a new normal by reliability professionals along with others (recovery resilience)
Resilience this way is a set of options, processes and strategies deployed 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 or not the large sociotechnical system is in normal operations versus disrupted operations versus failed operations versus recovered operations. So too for pastoralist systems 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 a “resilient” herder, though such herders exist.
Why does it matter that resilience is a systemwide set of options, processes and strategies? 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 in the Anthropocene, it is their definition of “temporary” that matters when it comes to their real-time reliability.
To return to Table 1, herder systems that maintain normal operations are apt to demonstrate what we call precursor resilience. “Normal” doesn’t mean 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. Formally, the precursors of disruption and failure are managed for, at least now when it matters. Shifting from one watering point, when an intervening problem arises there, to another just as good or within a range of good-enough is one such strategy. Labelling this, “coping,” seriously misrepresents the active system management going on.
Pastoralist systems, nevertheless, can and do experience temporary stoppages in their service provision—raiders seize livestock, remittances don’t arrive, offtake of livestock products is interrupted, random lightning triggers veldt fires—and here the efforts at restoring conditions back to normal is better termed restoration resilience. Access to other grazing areas (or alternative feed stocks or alternative sources of livelihood) may be required in the absence of 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 onward recovery from that failure. In this case, 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.
There is nothing predetermined in the Table 1 sequence. Nothing says it is inevitable that the failed system recovers to a new normal. It is crucial, nevertheless, to distinguish recovery from the 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 disaster after another. The reality for the pastoralists concerned may be that the system is already at a new normal, operating to a standard of reliability quite different than the outsider might think.
If you think of resilience in a pastoralist system as “the system’s capability in the face of its high reliability mandates to withstand the downsides of uncertainty and complexity 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 affordances. Here too, nothing predetermines that every pastoralist system will exhibit all four resiliencies, if and when their states of operation change.
2. Thinking infrastructurally about implications for pastoralist policy and management
At least eight very different insights follow directly for policy and management purposes from the reliability professionals and pastoralism-as-global infrastructure framework and preceding points about system resiliencies. Think of the latter again as a new policy narrative, with very different implications (in no order of priority):
1. The framework 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. . and so on).
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 beyond negative pastoralist impacts on drylands and rangelands.
2. No large critical infrastructure 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 misleads by being beside the point, if only because the latter are themselves likely to fail or disappear sooner than later and even without climate change.
3. Restocking schemes are regularly criticized for returning livestock to low-resource rangelands. Yet infrastructure for government commodity buffer stocks (e.g., storing grain, wool or oil to stabilize the prices of those commodities) are just as routinely recommended by experts, be the countries low-resource or not. Climate change has increased the calls for buffer stocks of food and commodities (e.g., Weber and Schulken 2024). Here, then, think of goat and cattle restocking schemes as just such buffer stocks.
4. A livestock raid undertaken by one pastoralist group on another in order to restore its herd differs from the livestock raid undertaken as an emergency response to its entire herd disappearing because of some other systemwide calamity, like a drought. The policy and management implications differ because in one you are restoring back to a system’s existing normal operations, whereas in the latter you are recovering to a new normal for the system, which requires far more and different stakeholders.
5. Pastoralist systems are routinely criticized for high inequality of holdings and ownership. But does that mean redistribution of herd numbers are to be a centerpiece of producing “equally sustainable livelihoods”? Wouldn’t requiring more equality in terms of stable outputs have to be open to very different production system or systems (e.g., social protection programs) than one centered around inputs and processes for livestock herding and rearing primarily?
6. Start with the conventional wisdom: Pastoralists, including their reliability professionals, are being displaced from their usual herding places by land encroachment, sedentarization, and climate change, among other factors.
Now focus on that subgroup of displaced pastoralists who are reliability professionals. One major question becomes what are the compensation, investment and steering policies of government and international agencies to address this displacement (e.g., see Bürgisser 2023).
That is, where are the policies and management protocols to: (1) compensate such skilled herders for loss of productive livelihoods, (2) upskill these herders further in the face of eventually losing their current employment, and (3) efforts to steer herding economies and markets in ways that do not lose out if and where new displacement occurs?
The answer? I am aware of no such national policies. Yet, I submit, it’s precisely these missing pieces that should be on the UN agenda for the 2026 International Year of Rangelands and Pastoralists, for example.
7. The key problem with the notion of “rangeland carrying capacity” is the assumption that it’s about livestock. That is wrong, because livestock numbers on a segment of land are not an infrastructure system. In just the same way as the number of its pipes, rods and valves are not an operating nuclear power plant.
From our infrastructure perspective, it’s not “rangeland carrying capacity” we should be talking about, but “rangeland management capacity”. Can herders make management mistakes about numbers? Of course. That is why pastoralists-to-pastoralists learning is so important around the notion of sharing and modifying better practices and increasing their portfolio of management options.
8. And, last, an issue taking us back to better addressing climate change. 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 what pastoralism as a global infrastructure does. How about rewarding its dryland exporters then for their water savings?
Discussion
I would be surprised if the preceding points were familiar to most readers. (Furthermore, it’s a fairly easy matter to add to this list of eight insights.[2]) True, I have not shown how the eight insights “stick,” if at all, for policymakers and managers. The aim here has been more modest: Their novelty via recasting issues is aimed at pushing you, the reader, to recognize conventional ways of describing and critiquing pastoralist policy and management are not set in stone. It’s your assumptions for your decisionmaking that this framework seek to underwrite and stabilize for better pastoralist development (Roe 1994).
I want to end this section with one more framework implication. For those who identify power and politics as the reasons why pastoralists are marginalized, there is the empirical question about how pastoralisms and climate changes and pastoralist developments are pluralized and contextualized within and across cases. Which is to say: Where are the granularities actionable for policy and management by pastoralists themselves?
Consider those policy narratives about center and periphery, where pastoralists have been pushed to the margins by top-down elites. An example of how a focus on relations, interactions, processes and networks more generally problematizes the narrative is found in the 2023 Annual Review of Anthropology article, “Financialization and the Household,” by Caitlin Zaloom and Deborah James. The quote below captures this sense of speaking substantively and interactively at a level no longer served – if ever – by homogenizing terms like “top-down”:
As a system, finance joins citizens, states, and global markets through the connections of kinship and residence. Householders use loans, investments, and assets to craft, reproduce, attenuate, and sever social connections and to elevate or maintain their class position. Householders’ social creativity fuels borrowing, making them the target of banks and other lenders. In pursuit of their own agendas, however, householders strategically deploy financial tools and techniques, sometimes mimicking and sometimes challenging their requirements. 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. Acts of conversion between them produce care for the self and others and refashion inherited duties. Social aspiration for connection and freedom is an essential force in both financial lives and institutions. (Zaloom and James, 2023, p.399)
Conclusion
But, you press, what about all those pastoralist inequalities and the poor? What about global climate change?
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 all 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 now though is this: 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.
Unsurprisingly by this point, my answer to that 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 more so now—and who, as always, just do not know how conditions in their task environments will change in the future beyond their next steps ahead.
And what about climate change? Sure, we need more resilience, but this takes us back to where our discussion began: With respect to what? The devil is in the details (or the First Rule of Policy Analysis: The opposite of good is good intentions). Take the case of geoengineering. Much of the current debate is about the unintended consequences of geoengineering and about the details for monitoring and evaluating them.
But those consequences are almost exclusively dominated by policy narratives of global North and South scientists. From the framework prospective, a major priority of governments and the regulators of geoengineering initiatives is to ensure that the early warning systems for droughts and bad weather in operation among pastoralists and agro-pastoralists are also canvassed. By way of example, I wonder what will be the decrease (or increase) in the murders of local “rainmakers” (forecasters) because of geoengineering indicators developed elsewhere (see Murahashi in this Special Issue).
References
Barry, A. 2021. “What is an environmental problem?” In the special issue, “Problematizing the Problematic,” Theory, Culture & Society 38(2): 93–117
Birch, K., C. Ward 2022. “Assetization and the ‘new asset geographies’.” Dialogues in Human Geography 14(1): 9 -24 (accessed online at https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/epub/10.1177/20438206221130807)
Bürgisser, R. 2023. Policy Responses to Technological Change in the Workplace. JRC Working Papers Series on Social Classes in the Digital Age 2023/04. European Commission, Seville (accessed online at https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/handle/JRC130830)
Konaka S., G. Semplici, P. D. Little (Eds.) 2023. Reconsidering resilience in African pastoralism: Towards a relational and contextual approach. Melbourne: Trans Pacific Press
Murahashi [To be provided]
Roe, E. 1994. Narrative Policy Analysis. Durham, NC: Duke University Press
———. 2020a. A New Policy Narrative for Pastoralism? Pastoralists as Reliability Professionals and Pastoralist Systems as Infrastructure, STEPS Working Paper 113, Brighton: STEPS Centre
———. 2020b. “Pastoralists as reliability professionals.” PASTRES blog (accessed online at https://pastres.org/2020/04/17/pastoralists-as-reliability-professionals/)
———. 2023. “The global infrastructure of pastoralist systems.” PASTRES blog (accessed online at https://pastres.org/2023/06/09/the-global-infrastructure-of-pastoralist-systems/)
Weber, I. and M. Schulken 2024. Towards a Post-neoliberal Stabilization Paradigm:Revisiting International Buffer Stocks in an Age of Overlapping Emergencies Based on the Case of Food. PERI Working Paper No. 602, Political Economy Research Institute, University of Massachusetts Amherst (accessed online at https://peri.umass.edu/publication/towards-a-post-neoliberal-stabilization-paradigm-for-an-age-of-overlapping-emergencies-revisiting-international-buffer-stocks-based-on-the-case-of-food/)
Zaloom, C., D. James 2023. “Financialization and the Household” in the Annual Review of Anthropology 52: 399-415 (accessed online at https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/full/10.1146/annurev-anthro-052721-100947)
Endnotes
[1] This section text is edited from Roe (2020b, 2023).
[2] Continue, for example, with the current literature on infrastructure assetization, which focuses on how schools, health facilities, policing systems, and large infrastructure projects are assetized for the purposes of securing rents and profits over time. Critics understandably see these developments in negative terms (e.g., Birch and Ward 2022).
Where so, why then are persistent failures and obstacles in establishing – read: assetizing – fixed-point pastoralist schools, immobile health facilities, and stationary livestock development projects treated in overwhelmingly negative terms by like-minded critics? Or to put the point from another direction: By viewing pastoralism as hard-to-assetize infrastructure, do we see a longer-term at work than we would be the case, were its assets financialized as easily as it has been for other infrastructures?
WHEN COMPLEX IS AS SIMPLE AS IT GETS 