Pastoralism and Development in Africa

Dynamic Change at the Margins

Andy Catley, Jeremy Lind, Ian Scoones, Andy Catley, Jeremy Lind, Ian Scoones

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415540711
• eBook ISBN: 9781136255847
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Development Economics
• Index: Economics

Once again, the Horn of Africa has been in the headlines. And once again the news has been bad: drought, famine, conflict, hunger, suffering and death. The finger of blame has been pointed in numerous directions: to the changing climate, to environmental degradation, to overpopulation, to geopolitics and conflict, to aid agency failures, and more. But it is not all disaster and catastrophe. Many successful development efforts at 'the margins' often remain hidden, informal, sometimes illegal; and rarely in line with standard development prescriptions. If we shift our gaze from the capital cities to the regional centres and their hinterlands, then a very different perspective emerges. These are the places where pastoralists live. They have for centuries struggled with drought, conflict and famine. They are resourceful, entrepreneurial and innovative peoples. Yet they have been ignored and marginalised by the states that control their territory and the development agencies who are supposed to help them. This book argues that, while we should not ignore the profound difficulties of creating secure livelihoods in the Greater Horn of Africa, there is much to be learned from development successes, large and small.

This book will be of great interest to students and scholars with an interest in development studies and human geography, with a particular emphasis on Africa. It will also appeal to development policy-makers and practitioners.

1 DEVELOPMENT AT THE MARGINS

Pastoralism in the Horn of Africa

Andy Catley, Jeremy Lind and Ian Scoones

DOI: 10.4324/9780203105979-1

Introduction

Once again, the Horn of Africa has been in the headlines. Once again the news has been bad: drought, famine, conflict, hunger, suffering and death. And once again, development and humanitarian aid experts have said we need to rethink. The famine of 2011–12 in southern Somalia and the humanitarian crisis in neighbouring areas of Kenya and Ethiopia have undoubtedly caused immense human suffering. The finger of blame has been pointed in numerous directions: to the changing climate, to environmental degradation, to overpopulation, to political interference, to geopolitics and conflict, to aid agency failures, and more. Of course this is not the first — or likely the last — time that the Horn of Africa has featured so prominently in global debates. But sadly the lessons are rarely learned and business-as-usual quickly returns.

This book argues that, while we should not ignore the profound difficulties of creating secure livelihoods for the majority of people in the Horn of Africa, there is much to be learned from development successes, large and small, in these areas. And that building from these is essential if future disasters are to be avoided. It offers a more positive, yet also nuanced, assessment than the doom and gloom view of powerless, suffering famine victims that is depicted by 24-hour news channels. It argues that development pathways at ‘the margins’ are imagined and constructed in new ways; ones that do not get recognized, appreciated or adopted easily by the mainstream. Such pathways often remain hidden, under the radar, informal, sometimes illegal, sometimes in contradiction to the priorities and interests of national political elites in the region, and rarely in line with standard, mainstream prescriptions. But if we shift our gaze from London, Washington, Rome or Geneva, not to the capital cities of Nairobi, Addis Ababa, Khartoum or Kampala, but to the regional centres of Jijiga, Hargeisa, Garissa, Gode, Isiolo or Moyale, and their hinterlands, then a very different set of development pathways emerge. These are the places where pastoralists — people who gain a substantial portion of their livelihood from livestock — live. They have for centuries struggled with drought, conflict and famine. They are resourceful, entrepreneurial and innovative peoples by necessity. This book addresses some of the recurrent misunderstandings about pastoral livelihoods, highlighting the particular features of pastoral resource and land management strategies, commercialization and marketing options, as well as wider livelihood dilemmas in the drylands.¹

A view of ‘development at the margins’ is one that highlights innovation and entrepreneurialism, not just coping or adaptation, as well as cooperation and networking across social and ecological borders, not just conflict and armed violence. It emphasizes diverse scenarios for responding to changing economic, ecological and political drivers, with multiple pathways envisaged for the future development of pastoral areas. It highlights the importance of the political and cultural contexts of such areas as central to addressing development challenges, and moves us beyond an ‘aid’ or ‘project’-driven intervention focus to a more systemic understanding of the complex, often uncertain, and always dynamic challenges and opportunities.

This book, focusing on pastoral societies across the Greater Horn of Africa (in this book a broadly defined region²), is not simply a story of marginal peoples living in marginal places, struggling in the face of exceptional hardships, remoteness and outside of the development mainstream. The challenges and opportunities of development at the margins have a far wider resonance in rethinking development more generally. The creative projects and innovative repertoires of those living in the margins offer many important lessons (Tsing, 1993). For, even in the places more connected to the mainstream — the ‘high potential’ farming areas and the comparatively fecund highland areas of north-eastern Africa, which are usually contrasted with the dryland ‘margins’ — we can observe many of the same challenges. The uncertainties of highly liberalized financial systems, heightened vulnerability provoked by climate change, variability of non-equilibrium ecologies, inequalities generated by an engagement with global markets and trade, ambivalent relationships between citizens and a retreating central state, threats posed by cross-border conflict and unconventional warfare and scarcities unleashed by competition over limited resources are evident in many places, not just at the so-called margins.

Just as with other ‘crises’ provoked by similar drivers, but in different contexts, decision-makers are perplexed as to how to respond. The system is broken, they say, but what do we do? In pastoral areas, many organizations — governments, NGOs, donors and research groups — lack long-term strategies based on solid evidence and insight into the multiple potential pathways for development. This book offers a guide to more suitable responses. While our focus is on the particular challenges of pastoral areas in the Horn of Africa, many of the emergent lessons are, as we discuss below, of more general importance for recasting development as a more effective response to current contexts characterized by uncertainty and complexity.

Contexts, complexities and commonalities

The Greater Horn of Africa region is a highly dynamic political-economic region (Figure 1.1), with different countries having very different political histories, cultural and religious affiliations, geopolitical positioning and development pathways. The colonial period split traditional socio-economic and spatial units with new state borders, and so reconfigured dramatically social and economic systems (Clapham, 1996). Pastoralists often found themselves both on the physical edges of new states, and in a situation where traditional movements to gain access to grazing, water or markets were prohibited due to their nature of cutting across both borders within new colonial states, as well as across newly established international boundaries. This period marked the beginnings of pastoral geographical and political marginalization in many countries (Lewis, 1983; Abbink, 1997; Schlee, 2003). In addition, colonial policies further isolated pastoralists from development, with, for example, an emphasis on agrarian highland areas and livestock development strategies in the lowlands based on ranching (Sandford, 1983; Baxter, 1991). African administrations in the post-colonial era often adopted or re-enforced the colonial policies, and these old attitudes and understandings are still very evident today, some 50 years or more after independence. Even in Ethiopia, which was never colonized, misunderstandings at a policy level about pastoralism, economics and mobility are strikingly similar today to those in Kenya or Uganda. Whereas in 1965, Jomo Kenyatta's economic blueprint formalized the inequitable allocation of resources to agricultural areas, Ethiopia's relatively recent policies describe pastoral areas as ‘backward’ and within the last five years, government resettlement schemes indicate that pastoralists should be displaced from riverine areas to make way for more commercially orientated investors (Lavers, 2012). The other defining aspects of pastoralist areas of the Horn have been violent conflict and drought, and the related humanitarian crises and famines. Natural and human causal factors combine in a deadly mix, as in the Afar region of Ethiopia (Markakis, 2003; Unruh, 2005), Darfur in Sudan (de Waal, 1989; Johnson, 2003; Young et al., 2005, 2009), the Uganda-Kenya border (Mkutu, 2007; Lind, 2012) or in southern Somalia today.

While such generalizations of geographical and political marginalization, misguided policy, and conflict and crisis apply to much of the Horn of Africa region, there are marked differences in the specific ways these trends have played out in different places. Each local set of conflict and livelihoods issues has a long and complex history, a history that is often poorly understood by policy-makers and development planners. Compare, for example, the myriad of contextual factors, varying over time, that contributed to local conflict between the Somali Issa and Oromo in eastern Ethiopia from the 1960s (Shide, 2005), conflict and livelihood collapse in Karamoja in Uganda (Stites et al., 2007) or the violent drivers of famine in Bahr el Ghazal in South Sudan in the 1990s and early 2000s (Deng, 2002). Variations occur between and within countries, and across time. There is no simple cause-effect story for how crises emerge.

Further layers of complexity are evident in many pastoral areas because local conflict, trade and livelihood issues are so often linked to national, regional and international political and economic trends. Where, for example, does one draw a boundary around the causes of conflict currently seen in South Sudan or Somalia? Are the challenges facing pastoralism in South Sudan merely due to local conflict drivers, or are there important north-south factors or, in some areas, cross-border links to conflicts in northern Kenya and Uganda, and south-west Ethiopia? And if so much of the conflict in South Sudan centres on the control of oil reserves in Upper Nile, where do foreign interests become critical (Coalition for International Justice 2006)? In Somalia, a long history of conflict is really a regional and international history. The regional elements include tensions with Ethiopia dating back to the Ogaden war in the 1970s and before, and reflected more recently by Ethiopian army incursions into southern Somalia in 2006. But would these events have happened without Soviet and US interests in the Horn during the Cold War, or more recent post-9/11 US foreign policy, framed around counter-terrorism objectives, or tense Ethiopia-Eritrea relations and Ethiopia's reliance on the Djibouti port?

FIGURE 1.1 The Greater Horn of Africa.

In order to understand both past and future pathways of change, in-depth, longitudinal analysis of complex, interacting factors is required. There is no shortage of high-quality research on the Horn of Africa. Consider the long-term research efforts around livelihoods, conflict and crisis in Darfur (de Waal, 1989; Young et al., 2005, 2009), the dynamics of the cross-border livestock trade from southern Somalia (Little and Mahmoud, 2005), conflict analyses in Afar, Ethiopia (Markakis, 2003), the emergence of stable government in Somaliland (Bradbury, 2008), and the changes observed in Maasai (Galaty, this book), Turkana (Little and Leslie, 1999; McCabe, 2004) and Rendille (Fratkin, 1991) areas of Kenya, or the Somali region of Ethiopia (Devereux, 2006). Across the drylands of Africa, there is better understanding of the dynamics of non-equilibrium environments (Ellis and Swift, 1988; Behnke et al., 1993; Vetter, 2005), and how pastoralists both live with and off uncertainty (Scoones, 1995 a; Little et al., 2001; Lybbert et al., 2004; Umar and Baulch, 2007; Krätli and Schareika, 2010). Yet whether local or regional, the analysis is becoming even more complex, with long-term trends combining with unpredictable events and shifting narratives. Today the high-profile concerns are, among others, climate change, counter-terrorism, food prices and global financial crises. One might also ask how the profound political events in the Arab world will affect conflict, oil and stability in the Horn. Or will the emergence of the ‘world's newest pseudostate’, being the US-backed buffer state of Azania/Jubaland in southern Somalia (Thurston, 2011), help to support pastoralism, peace and trade, or create new barriers? Furthermore, how will China's increasing involvement in aid in Africa affect pastoralists, and to what extent might China's domestic policies affect African thinking, as Goldsmith asks in this book? Against these storylines, the more mundane, but possibly more important trends quietly continue: population growth, commercialization and its impacts, and urbanization and out-migration.

Given the regional dimensions of livelihoods for so many pastoralists in the Horn, harmonized regional policies and support to the African organizations mandated to lead these processes are especially important. Yet, as in Europe, there are many challenges in bringing together governments with contrasting histories and political ideologies, and very different levels of legitimacy and stability. In terms of economies and trade, different states are pulled in different directions — towards the Middle East and North Africa, towards the highland core of East Africa or towards Central Africa, depending on market, political and cultural ties. As a category therefore, despite the pleas for integration, the Horn does not exist as a firm, easily definable geographical, political or economic uni...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figure
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• 1 Development at the margins: pastoralism in the Horn of Africa
• Part I Resources and production
• Part II Commercialization and markets
• Town camels and milk villages: the growth of camel milk marketing in the Somali Region of Ethiopia
• Part III Land and conflict
• Part IV Alternative livelihoods
• Part V Endpiece
• References
• Index