From 23rd of February to 1st of March 2025, I had an opportunity to attend the Drylands Summer School in Isiolo, Kenya that brought together master’s and PhD students with research interest in pastoralism in drylands. One of the objectives of the summer school was to debate on pastoral livelihoods through the lens of social, ecological and political perspectives. In the following sections, I explore key issues that arose during the summer school that are often overlooked and those which play a critical role in the dryland pastoral context.
Photo Credit: Julius Toba Malika
Drylands include semi-arid, dry, and sub-humid areas with lower rainfall than evaporation, making them highly unpredictable. Broad-leaved savanna woodlands sometimes with dense tree canopies or perennial grasses are the defining characteristics of drylands (IPCC, 2019). These diverse lands cover 46 percent of the global land area with about a third of them occurring in Africa, covering 19.6 million square kilometers and being home to over 525 million people (UNCCD,2017).
While the long-standing view groups drylands as ‘wastelands’ and categorizes them as low productivity lands, these areas offer a wide range of benefits to society including being habitats to important biodiversity (IPBES,2018) and a home to pastoralists (Galvin, 2009). However, drylands face serious risks to climate change with Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change projections revealing African drylands warming up twice the global average temperature rise (IPCC, 2018). The adverse impacts of the warming include prolonged droughts whose outcome is reduced water availability and livestock productivity. Recognizing the African Union’s call for a new African narrative that sees greater community ownership that is defined by co-creation of solutions (African Union, 2020), it is extremely important to deep dive into the status quo of drylands as far as climate change adaptation is concerned and what it means to pastoral communities, who depend on them for livelihoods.
The use of proxy data presents an excellent opportunity to detect change in climate variability over time. By studying how environmental indictors such as soil cores and tree rings have changed over time, we are able to understand the historical ecology, which reveals long-term human-environment interaction and the adaptation strategies through space and time (Oba, 2014). This is particularly important in devising adaptation strategies from the perspective of early pastoralists. In other words, what can we learn from the past that can influence future adaptation strategies among pastoralist communities?
While recent studies have argued that pastoralists’ adaptive capacity to climate change is very low and their vulnerability is higher (Tofu et al., 2025), a look in the past through an anthropological lens shows that pastoralists have adapted to changing environmental conditions through various ways. For instance, archeological evidence of rock-art pastoralists reveals how human behavior shifted from hunting to foraging to pastoralism in relation to changes in animal behavior and ecological conditions (Oba, 2014). Historical perspective is crucial in understanding how early pastoralists adapted to the changing climate and the lessons learned are important in designing new adaptation strategies.
Pastoral development has witnessed varying views. Certain dominant narratives have taken the center stage for pastoralism, which paint a picture of pastoralism as unviable and destructive form of livelihood and therefore tend to encourage alternative forms of livelihoods (Omondi & Odhiambo, 2009). Governments and development agencies often promote policies and solutions based on dominant narratives that misrepresent pastoralism and some of which seek to replace pastoralism as a livelihood rather than support its long-term progress (Scoones, 2023). To support a sustainable pastoral development, re-evaluating existing dominant narratives which often times are misconceptions is crucial, as this step forward will ensure that policies formulated are based on science- backed narratives.
Livestock mobility is another critical theme that has been muddled by dominant narratives. Commonly promoted actions driven by development actors advocate for limiting pastoral mobility including fencing grazing lands and establishing other fixed tenure systems in the spirit of controlling impacts of livestock on environment and ensuring pastoral communities are civilized and settled. Restricting pastoral mobility disrupts the long practiced adaptive strategies and influences the impact of livestock on environment. For instance, limiting livestock movements results in grazing pressures concentrated in specific areas, increasing the risk of overgrazing and land degradation (Scoones, 2023). Mobile pastoral systems on the other hand ensures livestock are distributed across vast landscapes, reducing localized pressure and allowing for natural regeneration. For example, during a Focus Group Discussion with Borana community as part of the Summer School learning activities, members of the community expressed their dissatisfaction in the actions of private landowners who fenced vast lands limiting free movement of livestock around in search of pasture and water as effects of drought intensified. “We have always moved across the land in search of water and pasture, but now we are being forced to stay in one place, even when our animals are starving.”- One elder expressed his frustration.
While livestock keeping for industrial purposes, which is characterized by feeding activities that are confined and long-distance transportation undeniably, harms the environment, extensive pastoral systems operate under vastly different principles as often times pastoralists rely on free-ranging livestock that are well adapted to natural grazing conditions. Whereas waste accumulates in concentrated areas for the case of industrial-based livestock systems and so does methane emissions, pastoral animals distribute their waste (dung and urine) across the landscape, which enriches soil carbon and nitrogen stores. This case challenges the dominant belief that all livestock contribute equally to greenhouse gas emissions. Low-density, mobile pastoral systems may have minimal, if any, net emissions beyond what a naturally functioning ecosystem would produce (Manzano et al., 2021). Failing to recognize these nuances risks undermining pastoral livelihoods while overlooking a nature-positive food system that aligns with climate resilience and biodiversity conservation. However, external pressures including land fragmentation and urbanization continue shaping mobile pastoralism as shrinking of land and competing land uses limit mobility. These challenges call for development and implementation of mechanisms, including governance frameworks that will promote mobile pastoralism in a changing socio-economic and ecological landscape. Despite their minimal contribution to emissions, pastoralists often face injustices under climate policies that treat all livestock systems uniformly. It is therefore imperative to address these disparities to ensure that climate policies are equitable and recognize the ecological benefits of well-managed pastoral systems.
The term resilience has become a buzzword in development and climate action, but its true meaning is interpreted in various ways to say the least. In social-ecological systems, resilience goes beyond ‘bouncing back.’ It involves transforming communities to adapt and thrive in changing conditions (Folke, 2016). With that in mind, for resilience-building efforts to succeed in the pastoral context, they must incorporate existing traditional knowledge with scientific approaches, adopt bottom-up approaches that are community-centered rather than the traditional top-down solutions and recognize the critical role of networks and social structures in building pastoral resilience. For instance, in Northern Kenya, ‘Uchus’ use traditional methods to predict weather patterns, complementing scientific forecasts, which the community often finds unreliable. In Marsabit, Kenya, pastoralists recognize the role of social networks such as herders and motorbike riders in response to uncertainties like prolonged droughts where they play critical role in locating pasture and water sources for livestock (Hassan, 2024).
Ensuring a sustainable future for pastoral communities in drylands calls for urgent reframing of dominant narratives through scientific evidence and integrate pastoral knowledge into policy frameworks. Rather than imposing externally driven solutions, policies should be co-designed with pastoralist communities, so that their voices and lived experiences shape resilience building actions and processes.
From the summer school it was evident that pastoralism faces a myriad of challenges including social, ecological and political changes. However, remembering keynote address from Professor Emeritus Gufu Oba- ‘Pastoralism will never disappear; collapse and recovery are expected to continue, as they always have across time.’ Organizing and forming networks of emerging and future scholars to counter misconceptions about pastoralism and advocate for pastoralist knowledge, and assets by linking science, policy and practice is an invaluable ingredient to ensuring pastoralism remains resilient to these changes.
Many thanks to the Center for Research and Development in Drylands (CRDD), in partnership with the Jameel Observatory, the Feinstein International Center, the Australian Center for International Agricultural Research (ACIAR) and the Drylands Futures Academy, for organizing and funding the Drylands Summer School for early- career researchers, which I had the privilege of attending.
Information about the author:
Julius Toba Malika is an AFAS Scholar of the 2nd MSc cohort based at the University of Nairobi in Kenya
(julius.malika@students.uonbi.ac.ke/ julius.malika06@gmail.com)
info[at]afas.africa