Advancing locally led early and anticipatory actions in drylands

by | Oct 6, 2025 | Anticipatory Action, Community of Practice, Dialogue, Drylands, Early Action, Early Warning, Eastern Africa, Horn of Africa, ICPALD, Local Knowledge, Pastoralism, SPARC | , ,

Our recent joint event on ‘Building the Resilience and Prosperity of Pastoralists and Dryland Communities’ featured a session that explored strategies for early warning and early action that strengthen existing local social structures to build long-term resilience while protecting people from crises. Here we provide a short report from the session and links for further information.

Session moderator Nelly Maonde (START Network) introduced the session and its focus on approaches and strategies to foster and reinforce locally-led early and anticipatory actions (AA).  Following the four short presentations, the audience was asked to reflect in table groups on the policy and practice implications of taking locally led actions seriously, identifying any specific actions that need to be taken.

Key insights presented:

  • Pastoralists use different pathways to predict crises, typically combining indigenous/local knowledge as well as information from formal (‘scientific’) predictions – “knowledge is not binary for pastoralists.”
  • Anticipatory actions should avoid thinking of binary knowledge at local level – in reality, the more knowledge sources pastoralists can draw from the better for them.
  • For AA to strengthen ownership and local resilience it needs to be embedded within existing community infrastructure. AA practitioners should work with local structures and institutions while tapping into the resources that exist locally.
  • There is a willingness among local communities to invest their own resources in early actions, as long as they are involved in planning, designing and implementing interventions. Community action planning is one tool that can enable this as it enables community members to take agency.
  • Local governments and communities are already doing AA but they often just don’t call it that. If we can avoid AA jargon and overcome our aversion to informality, we can provide more meaningful support for AA-related/adjacent activities that already take place.
  • Social protection needs to account for traditional ways in which pastoralists cope with shocks – principles of solidarity and reciprocity are often ignored while individualistic targeting is prioritized.
  • Targeting social protection takes reductionist understanding of shocks typically focusing on one event such as drought while traditional forms of social assistance account for other losses such as cattle raiding/rustling.

Main points of discussion or debate:

There was consensus around all these points – the point was also made that many of these are also known, so what prevents them being followed:

  • Policy development: move from consultation to co-creation.
  • Co-funding by communities is important.
  • Promote dialogue and coordination of all the actions/actors.
  • Develop multi stakeholder partnerships for grassroots inclusion.
  • We (development actors) need to be in listening mode and leave our preconceived ideas behind.
  • We need to find ways to fund activities that don’t undermine community initiatives. Government also has responsibility to fund local government.
  • Coming up with something that’s undefined and flexible does not imply it will lack accountability.

Implications for policy, practice and research:

  • Listen: We need to look at what people are already doing to anticipate events ranging from community level/grassroots to local government. Act and communicate in participatory ways that avoid jargon of AA. Just because something is not called AA does not mean it is not being undertaken.
  • Let us capitalize on local resources rather than creating parallel systems, recognizing that people are also willing to invest their own resources.
  • We must overcome our own biases and simplified notions around formality versus informality, indigenous versus scientific, etc. Communities and their representatives do not conceive the world in these ways and rigid binary perspectives get in the way of meaningful engagement.

Some take-away messages by the moderator:

  • Let us recognize and appreciate that communities and other local actors are already doing AA. It is not new to them though they may not use our terminology.
  • Let us engage with communities, their knowledge, and their local and informal ecosystems of actors so we are embedded in what they do
  • Locally, informal mechanisms and relationships are very important and working with and through these forces us to innovate and learn and adapt
  • Communities don’t think in binary ways, let us also think ‘together.’

More information – Speakers and presentations (with download links):

Other session reports