This article draws on research among pastoralist communities in the cross-border areas of northern Kenya and southern Ethiopia to explore local conceptions of vulnerability. It asks whether humanitarian agencies can move towards alternative approaches grounded in the more relational, networked understandings of vulnerability that shape life in the drylands.
Drought-related emergency assistance in the drylands is often shaped by understandings of vulnerability that do not match the dynamics that structure everyday life in pastoralist contexts.
Forms of humanitarian assessment and targeting undertaken before the implementation of assistance programmes tend to be oriented towards vulnerability measurements and assessment criteria that focus on individuals or households.
These approaches often fail to account for existing pastoralist systems of sharing, redistribution, and resource pooling.
Recent research into locally-led social protection, resilience, and livelihood change in the pastoral drylands highlights how pastoralists respond to crises through collective and networked practices, which take on diverse forms but are founded on a common understanding of vulnerability.
Differences in how vulnerability is both understood and responded to mean that aid organisations and local communities often do not see eye to eye, which results in mistrust and inefficiencies.
Key messages
- In the drylands, vulnerability is experienced and understood collectively, not just individually. Aid efforts aimed at household or individual levels are prone to misread the nature of risk in pastoralist societies.
- Aid that prioritises control often clashes with how pastoralists manage risk. Efforts to institute control and upward accountability can misread, or fail to engage meaningfully with, the local decision-making processes and social logics that govern crisis management in pastoralist settings.
- Context matters more, not less, as aid budgets shrink. Cost-cutting pressures may make centralised and standardised approaches to assistance seem more attractive, but these approaches often come at the expense of local relevance, flexibility, and trust.
More:
Read the article: Hassan, R., Derbyshire, S.F., Stites, E., and Scoones, I. 2026. Rethinking vulnerability and humanitarian assistance in the pastoral drylands: insights from northern Kenya and southern Ethiopia. Disasters 50(1): e70033