“Today’s conversations challenged us to rethink how anticipatory action works for pastoralists in chronically vulnerable drylands.”
Reporting in a LinkedIn post from today’s GLF Africa Resilient Rangelands pavilion session on ‘How can we make anticipatory action work for pastoralists?’’, Africa4Resilience singled out a standout message: “That anticipatory action works through relationships, trust, and community-centered approaches.”
Built around forecasts, early warning systems and pre-agreed triggers, ‘anticipatory action’ offers the prospect of acting early to reduce the impact of hazards. Yet in pastoralist regions across the Greater Horn of Africa, questions remain about what anticipatory action really is, what it does and who it serves.
Convened by Samuel Derbyshire (Jameel Observatory and ILRI), this session considered whether anticipatory action will become more technocratic and centralised, privileging standardisation and control? Or whether it can evolve in ways that strengthen local institutions, accountability and relationships between communities and authorities?
He suggested that anticipatory action should move from a purely trigger-based, technical model, to a flexible, caring approach, grounded in pastoralist logics of uncertainty.
Elements of a different approach could include:
- Targeting: Could assistance be better targeted towards collective institutions or vulnerabilities (rather than individual ones)?
- Flexibility: Are anticipatory action protocols sufficiently flexible to work with pastoralist livelihoods, and to support dynamic improvisation?
- Information: Is focus only on the ‘end user’ of weather and climate information appropriate in a context of limited capacity. How can weather and climate information ecosystems be better understood and supported, along with the two-way relationships connecting pastoralists with local authorities?
- Services: Can anticipatory action support existing local informal service provision – from transportation to informal credit?
Tahira Mohamed (Jameel Observatory and ILRI) suggested that for anticipatory action to really work in pastoralist areas, it has to be rooted in the relationships that really link and connect the lives and livelihoods of pastoralists.
Ahmed Mohamoud (ICPALD) argued that gaps are less around early warning and more about early action. The challenge is to co-produce actions and priorities with communities rather than forecast ‘for’ them.
Rahma Hassan (CRDD) called for more ‘pastoralist-sensitive’ anticipatory action, based on what pastoralists already do as well as a better understanding of the roles and contributions of different actors across the early warning and early action spaces. She emphasized the important roles of local ‘high reliability’ networked and knowledgeable individuals and localized systems/platforms which are key to effective local actions and resilience.
John Mutua (ILRI), noting that pastoralism is essentially an ‘anticipatory’ livelihood, explained the importance of forecasting and the need for it to be well translated to support decisions. He argued that anticipatory actions should as much as possible ‘amplify’ many of the protocols and strategies of pastoralists themselves.
In his summary observations, Guyo Malicha Roba (ICPALD) highlighted some key ‘sticking’ points: that traditional donors are tired of funding emergencies so affected governments and communities really need to step up and act; that greater attention to risk profiling and targeting is needed, so we better understand who are really vulnerable; and better ‘bridges’ between ‘conventional’ anticipatory action and anticipatory actions for pastoralists.
Reporting from the session in a LinkedIn post, Africa4Resilience said that “today’s conversations challenged us to rethink how anticipatory action works for pastoralists in chronically vulnerable drylands.”