This volume on the future of pastoralism in Africa’s drylands responds to pressing issues in the continent’s aid and development sectors, including climate change and drought management.
Pastoral Prosperities brings together contributions from diverse disciplinary perspectives to explore the future of mobile pastoralism in Africa’s drylands. Offering new empirical material from across the continent, it builds on pioneering works that have challenged fundamental assumptions about development, questioning approaches that overlook well-being, purpose, quality of life, and environmental health as central bearings of human flourishing. The book asks how the future is imagined and fought for in the drylands, and how understandings of this might broaden analytical frames that otherwise privilege narrow economic indicators.
Taking stock of the enduring power of negative narratives about pastoralism, the volume considers counter-narratives from multiple corners, tracing their alternative visions of both the past and the future. It explores everyday aspirations and practices to make sense of sweeping socio-economic, political and environmental change. In doing so, Pastoral Prosperities gestures towards new cross-disciplinary and cross-sectoral conversations that might inform more grounded approaches to investment, governance, and support in the years ahead.
Table of Contents
List of tables
List of contributors
List of abbreviations
Foreword
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Pastoral prosperities
Samuel F. Derbyshire, Tahira Mohamed and Rahma Hassan
Part I: Crisis
1 Pastoral prosperity in crisis
Samuel F. Derbyshire and Rahma Hassan
2 Projections of prosperity: crisis, development and the marginalisation of pastoralism in Ethiopia
Roba Jilo
3 Sharing futures: lessons from pastoralist disaster response in northern Somalia
Sahra Ahmed Koshin
4 Prosperity in decline: moral and political ecologies of pastoral adaptation in Guji and Borana, Ethiopia
Geleta Tesfaye Berisso
Part II: Commerce
5 Negotiating prosperity: pastoralist livestock marketing in northern Kenya
Guyo Roba
6 Markets, conflict and change: forging prosperity through uncertainty in pastoral Kenya and Ethiopia
Rupsha Banerjee, Tanaya DuttaGupta, Kelvin Shikuku, Meshak Baraza, Watson Lepariyo, Diba Galgalo and Wako Gobu
7 Pastoralist women’s pathways to prosperity: collective solidarity, commoning and moral economy practices in Kenya’s arid and semi-arid lands
Eunice Wangari-Muneri and Tahira Mohamed
Part III: Connection
8 Social capital and everyday practices of resilience building among pastoralists in Karamoja
Padmini Iyer and Simon Peter Longoli
9 Nomadic skillsets beyond the desert: Western Sahara’s post-pastoralist generation
Matthew Porges
10 Navigating uncertainty through institutional adaptability in northern Uganda
Matteo Caravani
Afterword: the drylands of tomorrow
Gufu Oba