“If resilience is truly about adaptation and survival in changing climates, then respecting mobility, indigenous knowledge and community-led governance cannot remain optional. They must be central.”
This key insight from today’s GLFAfrica Resilient Rangelands pavilion session on ‘Rethinking resilience and investment in drylands’’ was captured by our partners WHH in their LinkedIn post.
Resilience programming is widespread across East Africa’s drylands, aiming to promote holistic system-wide capacities to withstand shocks and stresses in the face of competing land uses such as carbon credits, industrialization, urbanization, extractives and conservation.
However, there is widespread concern that the ‘resilience’ promoted by humanitarian, development or other actors is not necessarily the same as what a pastoralist community would consider as resilience.
This session explored different notions of resilience in drylands and whether other definitions or other forms of locally-led resilience, solidarity and social protection can take on greater roles in policy and practice.
Tahira Mohamed (Jameel Observatory and ILRI) framed the discussions illustrating how development planners typically look at drylands in terms of fragile, remote, unproductive and variable environments; requiring alternative livelihoods; with people’s identities mainly described as vulnerable, hungry and food insecure.
Looking at the same indicators, she suggested that pastoralists themselves might see environmental variability, not as a threat as considered by planners, but as an opportunity underpinned by mobility. On livelihoods, rather than diversifying out of pastoralism, she suggested that pastoralist communities instead see multiple livelihoods taken up in parallel alongside classic livestock keeping. On identity, pastoralists see endurance, belonging and solidarity rather than vulnerability.
She challenged the audience to see, and act upon, drylands and pastoralists differently:
- Resilience is not a thing, it is a long-term transformation and strengthening of diverse livelihood systems
- Resilience is relational, it is embedded in multiple identities, culture and economies
- Resilience emerges from everyday processes and practices rooted in communities
Moderated by James Love of WHH, a panel of resilience researchers and practitioners further interrogated the issues raised: Wendy Chamberlin, Rahma Hassan (CRDD), Samuel Derbyshire (Jameel Observatory and ILRI), Michael Odhiambo (RVI) and Husna Mbarak (FAO).
Derbyshire emphasized that resilience is not a static notion to be achieved; it is the living, evolving, adapting and dynamic knowledge of communities.
Building on this, Odhiambo also highlighted knowledge, especially of pastoralist communities themselves. He argued that this, along with community governance mechanisms, need to be properly respected and reinforced. We need to move away from the notion that resilience is determined by knowledge brought to communities from outside.
Continuing the community focus, Hassan emphasized that resilience comes from below, it is closely linked to the critical relationships among people and communities and ‘success’ or otherwise is therefore best determined by community members themselves.
Mbarak, asked to explore ‘responsible’ governance of rangelands, said the starting point is to recognize that rangelands are productive assets. She picked out some characteristics of being responsible: it is longer term, it is investment not aid, it is public-private partnerships, it is locally led governance [of and by and with communities], it is integrated and it recognizes mobility that underpins pastoralist systems.
Chamberlin questioned whether inclusive finance indicators (access and use) are appropriate when looking at drylands and resilience. She argued that access to digital finance does not necessarily lead to resilience and we need to look beyond these indicators to consider the contributions of more traditional moral economy approaches to financial inclusion/resilience.
Reflecting on the panel remarks, Love concluded that we need to redefine resilience for drylands; and we need to redefine it from below.
In his closing remarks, Dereje Wakjira, ICPALD Director, argued that we need to see resilience as an adaptive process, not a target. Further, in recent years we have seen people and communities finding their own routes to prosperity and hopefully greater resilience, so let us strengthen these. Finally, he re-emphasized the importance of the governance of common resources that are at the heart of common resilience in drylands and rangelands.
More:
- The Resilient Rangelands pavilion
- Tahira Mohamed’s presentation
- GLF Africa website