Pastoralism & Natural Resources (page 23)
Participatory mapping with pastoralists reveals their mental maps
Understanding users’ perception of natural resources is important in planning their sustainable use and management. Pastoralist communities manage their vast grazing territories and exploit resource variability through strategic mobility. To improve understanding of the local knowledge on which this is based and to document this knowledge in a way that can be communicated with “outsiders”, […]
50 years of research on pastoralism & development
The Institute of Development Studies (IDS) in the UK has issued a collection of IDS Bulletin articles that reflects on 50 years of research on pastoralism at IDS. The “end of pastoralism” was proclaimed widely in the 1970s, yet pastoralism has survived as a successful, resilient livelihood adapted to some of the harshest environments on […]
Pastoralists as reliability professionals
The working paper “A new policy narrative for pastoralism? Pastoralists as reliability professionals and pastoralist systems as infrastructure” by Emery Roe (2020, 33pp) proposes that pastoralist systems are better treated, in aggregate, as a global critical infrastructure. The policy and management implications that follow differ importantly from current pastoralist policies and recommendations. A multi-typology framework […]
Bush encroachment and rangeland management in southern Ethiopia
Rangelands in southern Ethiopia have been undergoing a rapid shift from herbaceous to woody plant dominance in past decades, reducing indigenous plant biodiversity, altering ecosystem function and threatening pastoralism. Despite significant rangeland management implications, quantification of the extent of bush encroachment and transitional pathways that result in encroachment remain largely underexplored. The paper “Bush encroachment […]
Historical ecologies of overgrazing in Kenya
The spectre of “overgrazing” looms large in historical and political narratives of ecological degradation in savannah ecosystems. While pastoral exploitation is a conspicuous driver of landscape variability and modification, assumptions that such change is inevitable or necessarily negative deserve to be continuously evaluated and challenged. With reference to three case studies in Kenya – the […]