Our fourth annual report covers our activities between July 2024 and June 2025 and reports on a busy year in which we:
- Researched and identified solutions by co-creating evidence on bottlenecks to effective early action, devising and testing solutions that can bring change.
- Informed and influenced practitioners and policymakers by convening inclusive dialogues, fostering partnerships and building consensus on necessary policies and interventions.
- Developed the capacities of dryland stakeholders to manage environmental shocks through the Dryland Futures Academy.
It further reports on a busy year of communication and engagement in which we convened or co-convened 15 events with partners, involving 233 participants from 91 organisations; we disseminated 117 knowledge products and videos and 62 web updates; and our social channels and Dgroup platform grew.
Here we introduce some emerging key messages from our research.
Emerging insights
From our research, we have identified some key messages around food security early action in drylands and for pastoralist communities
Adopt new narratives on pastoralist prosperity in Africa’s drylands
Evidence from our, and our partners’ research challenges dominant growth-focused paradigms around pastoralist prosperity. Looking beyond conventional economic metrics, it foregrounds diverse visions of well-being, quality of life and ecological sustainability that resonate with pastoralist communities’ lived realities. Building on recent theoretical advances, we argue the case for pastoralism as a dynamic way of life uniquely adapted to managing extreme uncertainty, one that resists simplistic interventions oriented toward control and predictability.
Through original, cross-disciplinary case studies – our own, those of our collaborators and partners and others we have commissioned – our work is documenting the complex social, economic and environmental processes through which pastoralists pursue prosperity – highlighting the importance of local knowledge, relational resilience, moral economies and flexible livelihood strategies.
Our work shows the limitations of prevailing policy and development models that marginalize pastoralist aspirations, and we have identified key areas for future investment and innovation in governance, humanitarian assistance and sustainable development. This vision advances a pluralistic, nuanced understanding of prosperity – one that recognizes the heterogeneity of pastoral experiences and the creative agency pastoralists exercise amid shifting political and ecological landscapes.
Re-think early and anticipatory action for pastoralist and dryland settings
While anticipatory action has demonstrated effectiveness in mitigating the impacts of sudden-onset disasters such as floods and cyclones, our research highlights its more limited success in mobile, livestock-dependent communities facing recurrent droughts. These dryland environments present complex socio- economic and ecological challenges where crises unfold in non-linear, heterogeneous ways that complicate prediction and timely intervention. Our work challenges some dominant priorities within the anticipatory action discourse by foregrounding the distinctive livelihoods, knowledge systems and adaptive strategies of pastoralists, which have often been overlooked in programming design.
By synthesising evidence and perspectives, opening up new dialogues and conducting new research, we have identified critical gaps and pressing areas for future investment, advocating for novel, context-sensitive approaches that better align with the realities of pastoral communities and unlock new potentials for early action in these dynamic landscapes.
Avoid false binaries around knowledge for action at community levels
Pastoralist communities in the Horn of Africa have long relied on local, traditional or indigenous knowledge. This is frequently portrayed as timeless, static, and insulated from historical and socio-political transformation. In contrast, scientific knowledge has been valorised for its perceived precision, objectivity, and universality, leading to persistent calls for ‘integration’ of the two systems. Our research reveals a more nuanced reality that captures the lived experiences of pastoralist communities in northern Kenya who actively engage with and navigate both knowledge systems.
They continue to draw on intergenerational knowledge passed down through traditions and daily practice, while also engaging with contemporary scientific methods. For them, knowledge boundaries between local and scientific knowledge are neither fixed nor absolute, but situational, negotiated, and context-dependent.
Our findings suggest that these communities already mobilise multiple, coexisting forms of knowledge to navigate the uncertainties of a volatile climate, actively resisting externally imposed binaries between ‘local’ and ‘scientific’ ways of knowing. Rather than viewing integration as a technical solution, we can see the emergence of knowledge pluralism, rooted in social memory, intergenerational learning, and culturally embedded practices. This pluralism is not just a blend of knowledge systems, but a dynamic, context-specific process of meaning- making.
Our work advocates for more equitable, decolonial, and plural approaches to climate knowledge. We call for epistemic justice where community knowledge is not conditionally legitimised through scientific paradigms, but recognised, respected, and interpreted within its own internal logic and socio-cultural grounding.
Break down silos that reduce aid effectiveness in the drylands
As crises become more frequent and complex, we need to move beyond emergency relief to build long-term resilience that reduces the need for, and the cost of, future humanitarian interventions. Our research examined the institutional cultures and principles that facilitate effective coordination of disaster management through linking short-term emergency and long- term response. Early findings suggest that breaking institutional silos among humanitarian and development actors requires concrete multi- year flexible financing across the nexus, building incentives within organisations for more joined-up approaches including smarter use of Key Performance Indicators and strong political will to better complement emergency responses with long-term resilience programs.
Re-position resilience and social protection for the drylands
Building on long-term research on the forms of collective solidarity, our research places the principles of moral economy at the centre of social protection policies. With recent shifts in international development and aid cuts, re-thinking the provisioning of social assistance is fundamental, and some lessons can be drawn from moral economy practices rooted in normative redistribution and collective solidarities. This research provides key lessons around flexibility in targeting, local conceptualization of poverty, governance and implementation of social provisioning policies. It challenges risk-centred, production-focused interventions for improving chronic household food insecurity.