Michael Bollig

Adaptive cycles in the savannah: pastoral specialization and diversification in northern Kenya

ABSTRACT Comparative evidence from Eastern Africa suggests the emergence of a highly specialized mobile pastoral livelihood came about in the early- to mid-nineteenth century. Developments in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have seen a distinct turn away from this model of pastoral specialization, towards a more mixed and spatially varied set of livelihood strategies. Low intensity warfare, environmental degradation, rapid population increase, and a shift away from cattle pastoralism and towards goat and camel herding are all evident in the current transition of Pokot livelihoods. Lifestyles have become more sedentary and diversified, while agricultural activities have rapidly spread, with the increased marketing of livestock and other commodities. This article traces the history of these changes among the pastoral Pokot of north-western Kenya (todays Baringo County), using the notions of the adaptive cycle and resilience as key explanatory tools in seeking to understand the patterns and drivers of change over time.

Assessing the resilience of a real-world social-ecological system: lessons from a multidisciplinary evaluation of a South African pastoral system

In the past decades, social-ecological systems (SESs) worldwide have undergone dramatic transformations with often detrimental consequences for livelihoods. Although resilience thinking offers promising conceptual frameworks to understand SES transformations, empirical resilience assessments of real-world SESs are still rare because SES complexity requires integrating knowledge, theories, and approaches from different disciplines. Taking up this challenge, we empirically assess the resilience of a South African pastoral SES to drought using various methods from natural and social sciences. In the ecological subsystem, we analyze rangelands’ ability to buffer drought effects on forage provision, using soil and vegetation indicators. In the social subsystem, we assess households’ and communities’ capacities to mitigate drought effects, applying agronomic and institutional indicators and benchmarking against practices and institutions in traditional pastoral SESs. Our results indicate that a decoupling of livelihoods from livestockgenerated income was initiated by government interventions in the 1930s. In the post-apartheid phase, minimum-input strategies of herd management were adopted, leading to a recovery of rangeland vegetation due to unintentionally reduced stocking densities. Because current livelihood security is mainly based on external monetary resources (pensions, child grants, and disability grants), household resilience to drought is higher than in historical phases. Our study is one of the first to use a truly multidisciplinary resilience assessment. Conflicting results from partial assessments underline that measuring narrow indicator sets may impede a deeper understanding of SES transformations. The results also imply that the resilience of contemporary, open SESs cannot be explained by an inward-looking approach because essential connections and drivers at other scales have become relevant in the globalized world. Our study thus has helped to identify pitfalls in empirical resilience assessment and to improve the conceptualization of SES dynamics.

Resilience and collapse: histories, ecologies, conflicts and identities in the Baringo-Bogoria basin, Kenya

ABSTRACT The concept of resilience is now applied across the natural and social sciences to provide a means of examining and understanding adaptation and transformation over a longer time period, in response to environmental, economic, cultural, or political shocks or adverse events. This essay introduces a collection of 10 studies that analyse resilience in the context of the Baringo-Bogoria basin, a predominantly savannah ecological zone in Kenyas northern Rift Valley. Framed by the adaptive cycle model, the studies span a history of 200 years, but also detail current challenges to the social-ecological system of the region. Resilience has allowed the communities of Baringo-Bogoria to adapt and transform in order to maintain production systems dominated by cattle pastoralism, with intensive agriculture in niche locations. The authors suggest that the most recent challenges confronting the peoples of this region – intensified conflicts, mounting poverty driven by demographic pressures, and dramatic ecological changes brought by invasive species – have contributed to a collapse in essential elements of the specialised cattle production system, requiring a re-orientation of the social-ecological system.

Land-use changes and the invasion dynamics of shrubs in Baringo

ABSTRACT In the semi-arid savannahs around Lake Baringo, Kenya, the recent spread of bush encroachment by the invasive alien species Prosopis juliflora and the native Dodonaea viscosa has changed human–environment interactions. This article suggests how the spread dynamics of Prosopis and Dodonaea have operated. It also describes the strategies Baringos peoples have adopted in the face of this dramatic bush invasion, relates these dynamics to current invasion theory, and analyses possible implications for Baringos social–ecological systems. It is suggested that recent increased climate variability has triggered changes in land management and livelihoods around Lake Baringo, paving the way for bush encroachment and species invasion. The extent and speed of these changes has exceeded the capacity of local communities to adapt their productive systems, destabilizing the socio-ecology of the dryland savannahs around Lake Baringo and placing them in imminent danger of collapse.

Moral equality and success of common-pool water governance in Namibia.

In the course of decentralization, pastoral communities in Namibia have had to find new ways to share their most salient resource, water, and the costs involved in providing it. Using data from sixty communities, we examine (1) whether and to what extent different sharing rules emerge, (2) how variations can be explained, (3) how rules are perceived and influence success, and (4) what economic consequences they have. Our results reveal that either all members pay the same (numerical equality) or payment is according to usage (proportional equality). We find that although proportional equality provides more success, the rule can only pertain where the state maintains an active role. Simulations show that where it does not prevail, wealth inequality is likely to grow. These findings have political implications and suggest that, in the context of the widespread decentralization policies, the state should not withdraw if it aims to ensure the success of common-pool resource management and to fight poverty.

Local Rules and Their Enforcement in the Arabuko-Sokoke Forest Reserve Co-Management Arrangement in Kenya

ABSTRACT The management of common-pool resources is a key problem in global environmental governance: forests, freshwater resources, pastures, and land are often managed by communities and organisations (bureaucracies, NGOs) at different organisational scales that are competing for the right to manage the resource in question, and often find ambiguous negotiated institutional solutions to co-management problems. Often these solutions are the result of complex bargaining processes rather than of institutional design. In the context of the ongoing debate over the kinds of rules that are appropriate for the sustainable management of common-pool resources (CPRs), this paper examines the local rules and their enforcement emerging from comanagement between government agencies and local project communities in Arabuko-Sokoke Forest Reserve (ASFR), Kenyas largest remaining coastal forest. Arabuko-Sokoke has been a national forest reserve for many decades, but only during the past two decades have communities been involved in conservation and resource extraction under piloting participatory forest-management schemes. A state-owned and controlled resource is made into a co-managed common-pool resource—or so the theory of community-based natural resource management goes. Our contribution is informed by Ostroms (1990, 2008) design principles, but we critically scrutinize the manifold problems involved in transfers of access and management rights from state to local community, and the planned (re-)emergence of common-pool resource management. We compare communities involved in a governmental programme fostering communal management and communities not involved in such programmes (The study addresses a number of critical questions related to the transfer of centralised governmental rights in the management of natural resources, and the co-management of forests between government agencies and local communities. The ASFR co-management programme was initiated nearly two decades ago with the aim of conserving the forest and at the same time improving the livelihoods of the communities dependent on it. The findings show that despite a number of challenges, local rules and enforcement have started to emerge in co-managed parts of ASFR, though in an imperfect, volatile and ambiguous manner.

The political ecology of hunting in Namibia’s Kaokoveld: from Dorsland Trekkers’ elephant hunts to trophy-hunting in contemporary conservancies

ABSTRACT Throughout the past 120 years, hunting has linked the semi-arid Kaokoveld (northwestern Namibia) to global trade networks simultaneously embedding it within global aspirations to preserve African fauna untrammelled. The hunting of elephants for ivory, of endemic species for scientific inventories, of large game for the leisurely hunt, and clandestine poaching by South African officials and military, as well as contemporary forms of legalised hunting for trophies and saleable game meat, have continuously connected local pastoral communities, the environment, the state, and external globally operating actors. Flows of trophies, commodities, services, knowledge, and weapons between hunters, carriers and scouts, scientists and translators, intermediary traders and operators, state officials, and experts of international organisations have contributed not only to the dynamic development of a specific local–global interface, but also to the continuous re-shaping of biocultural frontiers between game species and humans. These flows have been strongly driven by the shifting tides of commodification of game, its state-enforced de-commodification, and its recent recommodification. This paper first addresses the elephant hunts of the late nineteenth/early twentieth centuries, and the hunting for scientific purposes in the first half of the twentieth century. It then proceeds to look at ‘subsistence’ hunting, and leisure hunting by colonial officials, and finally deals with modern trophy-hunting in the context of community-based natural resource management.