Search

Authorities have often seen pastoralist mobility as a challenge for public health and veterinary disease control. While the movement of humans and animals can influence disease transmission, authorities often overlook the complexity of these epidemiological relations and ignore the ecological and economic trade-offs of restricting pastoral mobility. This study reviews the Covid-19 response at the border between Turkana County (Kenya) and Moroto District (Uganda), with particular focus on the Kenyan side. Drawing on interviews with Kenyan public health officials, NGOs’ practitioners and pastoral households, we examine the treatment of pastoralist mobility in the Covid-19 response. Our findings suggest that, while there is special attention to and investment in extending health services to pastoralists, most of the thinking focuses on their rural location and household dispersal, rather than their mobility. In fact, pastoral transhumance was at times treated as a threat to disease control and national public health while other forms of cross-border mobility continued. We apply the concept of ‘sedentist bias’ to suggest that this understanding of pastoral mobility has become entrenched in the technics of public health planning.

The recognition that pastoralism is well-suited to conditions of variability and uncertainty is growing among academics and policy-makers. With the notion that schooled individuals with pastoralist backgrounds could influence political decisions regarding support and providing services for mobile pastoralism, this paper questions the sedentist bias among schooled Tuareg in the Agadez region. In the first part, the history of schooling for nomads in Niger is discussed in the context of schooling for mobile people. Compared to experiences elsewhere, boarding schools can either encourage sedentarisation or support mobility. The same holds in the case of service centres for mobile populations, which are making their way back to regional planning. Ideas regarding the development of schooled Tuareg from caravan and gardening backgrounds in Aïr and from pastoralist communities in the west and south of Aïr are not only influenced by schooling, but relate to different development trends and depend on individual experiences, identity and affective relation to pastoralism. While on the one hand, certain schooled Tuaregs have embraced a sedentist vision of development, those who enjoy active relationships with nomadic pastoralists nonetheless recognise the value of their customary knowledge and practices, including herd mobility. Schools could participate in transmitting a favourable image of pastoralism as a productive system for sustainable futures and thereby equip future generations of diverse policymakers to engage meaningfully with mobile pastoralists.

Livestock identification and traceability systems (LITS) are an increasingly prominent component of national livestock development policies around the world. In theory, LITS allow governments to track and respond to disease and livestock theft efficiently. However, this paper argues that LITS are suffused with sedentist assumptions that are at odds with the livestock management practices of pastoralist communities. Drawing on qualitative interviews with implementing bureaucrats and affected pastoralist communities as well as one author’s experience of growing up and managing cattle in a pastoralist community, we review the sedentist assumptions that animate the Namibian Livestock Identification and Traceability System (NamLITS) and describe how pastoralists in north-western Namibia perceive that NamLITS has affected their economic, social and political lives. We then show the strategies that pastoralists use to comply and circumvent NamLITS, and conclude with lessons for governments and development practitioners considering livestock tracing systems and mobile communities affected by them.

This article examines the process of securing land rights for pastoralists in Kenya, applying the concept of sedentism to understand the impact of two recent changes in Kenyan land governance. In 2010, the Government of Kenya passed a new constitution, which devolved government power to the local level. A declared aim was to give communities greater influence over governance of their lands. Then, in 2016, the Government passed the Community Land Act, which aims at formalising community ownership of land through group registration. Drawing on fieldwork among pastoralists living in Samburu County in Northern Kenya, we show that despite ostensibly aiming to empower local pastoralist communities and provide better recognition of their land rights, these two changes interact to promote the sedentarisation of pastoralists. The Community Land Act has treated communal grasslands as clusters of discrete parcels rather than as integrated rangeland ecosystems. In combination with devolution, this runs counter to the flexible and negotiated forms of land governance upon which pastoralists’ livelihoods rely, thereby making them susceptible to sedentarism and dispossession.

This article examines the process of securing land rights for pastoralists in Kenya, applying the concept of sedentism to understand the impact of two recent changes in Kenyan land governance. In 2010, the Government of Kenya passed a new constitution, which devolved government power to the local level. A declared aim was to give communities greater influence over governance of their lands. Then, in 2016, the Government passed the Community Land Act, which aims at formalising community ownership of land through group registration. Drawing on fieldwork among pastoralists living in Samburu County in Northern Kenya, we show that despite ostensibly aiming to empower local pastoralist communities and provide better recognition of their land rights, these two changes interact to promote the sedentarisation of pastoralists. The Community Land Act has treated communal grasslands as clusters of discrete parcels rather than as integrated rangeland ecosystems. In combination with devolution, this runs counter to the flexible and negotiated forms of land governance upon which pastoralists' livelihoods rely, thereby making them susceptible to sedentarism and dispossession. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The recognition that pastoralism is well-suited to conditions of variability and uncertainty is growing among academics and policy-makers. With the notion that schooled individuals with pastoralist backgrounds could influence political decisions regarding support and providing services for mobile pastoralism, this paper questions the sedentist bias among schooled Tuareg in the Agadez region. In the first part, the history of schooling for nomads in Niger is discussed in the context of schooling for mobile people. Compared to experiences elsewhere, boarding schools can either encourage sedentarisation or support mobility. The same holds in the case of service centres for mobile populations, which are making their way back to regional planning. Ideas regarding the development of schooled Tuareg from caravan and gardening backgrounds in Aïr and from pastoralist communities in the west and south of Aïr are not only influenced by schooling, but relate to different development trends and depend on individual experiences, identity and affective relation to pastoralism. While on the one hand, certain schooled Tuaregs have embraced a sedentist vision of development, those who enjoy active relationships with nomadic pastoralists nonetheless recognise the value of their customary knowledge and practices, including herd mobility. Schools could participate in transmitting a favourable image of pastoralism as a productive system for sustainable futures and thereby equip future generations of diverse policymakers to engage meaningfully with mobile pastoralists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Authorities have often seen pastoralist mobility as a challenge for public health and veterinary disease control. While the movement of humans and animals can influence disease transmission, authorities often overlook the complexity of these epidemiological relations and ignore the ecological and economic trade-offs of restricting pastoral mobility. This study reviews the Covid-19 response at the border between Turkana County (Kenya) and Moroto District (Uganda), with particular focus on the Kenyan side. Drawing on interviews with Kenyan public health officials, NGOs' practitioners and pastoral households, we examine the treatment of pastoralist mobility in the Covid-19 response. Our findings suggest that, while there is special attention to and investment in extending health services to pastoralists, most of the thinking focuses on their rural location and household dispersal, rather than their mobility. In fact, pastoral transhumance was at times treated as a threat to disease control and national public health while other forms of cross-border mobility continued. We apply the concept of 'sedentist bias' to suggest that this understanding of pastoral mobility has become entrenched in the technics of public health planning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Livestock identification and traceability systems (LITS) are an increasingly prominent component of national livestock development policies around the world. In theory, LITS allow governments to track and respond to disease and livestock theft efficiently. However, this paper argues that LITS are suffused with sedentist assumptions that are at odds with the livestock management practices of pastoralist communities. Drawing on qualitative interviews with implementing bureaucrats and affected pastoralist communities as well as one author's experience of growing up and managing cattle in a pastoralist community, we review the sedentist assumptions that animate the Namibian Livestock Identification and Traceability System (NamLITS) and describe how pastoralists in north-western Namibia perceive that NamLITS has affected their economic, social and political lives. We then show the strategies that pastoralists use to comply and circumvent NamLITS, and conclude with lessons for governments and development practitioners considering livestock tracing systems and mobile communities affected by them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With reference to Jeffrey C. Kaufmann's concept of a 'sediment of nomadism', for which pastoralism is still, implicitly or not, referenced and essentialised to 'pure' degrees of mobility and 'pure' food economies centred around livestock, this article argues that, in pastoral settings, sedentism is equally essentialised. This article reverses the traditional critique of the nomadism/sedentism dichotomy by questioning the relevance of ideal types of 'pure sedentism'. Based on fourteen months of ethnographic fieldwork in the Northern Kenya arid lands, this article looks away from big cities and regional urbanities to focus on small settlements springing up along improved roads and telecommunications infrastructure, showing that places are never motionless, despite measures of emplacement promoted by national and local governments and the international community. The drilling of boreholes, the construction of health centres and schools, the distribution of aid does not stop the mobility of places nor of their inhabitants. Until places remain mobile, they are alive; otherwise they clot. This argument makes it possible to move beyond a dichotomic definition of sedentism and nomadism to value changes, flexibility, and plasticity as important features of places created and recreated by mobile pastoralists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]