Managing Resilience in Pastoralism: An Introduction

This introductory chapter supplies an overview of this book. It describes terms such as adaptations, collapse, disasters, and resilience. It deals with the event histories that influenced pastoralists’ adaptations to catastrophe in the present-day trans-frontier region of southern Ethiopia–northern Kenya. The geographical area under review stands for landscapes of social memory covering five centuries. The work selected the trans-frontier Borana Oromo community as a case study. It uses three historical periods to track events. The first period is the pre-colonial era, for which we used social memory to show cycles of disasters. The second period is the colonial period, during which we relied on colonial archives and examined how the control of herd grazing movements across international frontiers influenced adaptive strategies to climatic shocks. The third is the post-independence period. We evaluated how during the post-independence warfare collapsed pastoralism and transformed land use, and further assessed how the collapse of the pastoral economy motivated the society to turn to settled agropastoral land use. From the 1980s to the 2000s, the work investigated various individual drought management strategies, long-term cattle population trends, and household wealth dynamics for 29 years. It assesses how pastoral collapse transformed social capital networks and how neighborhood household food security networks used by women promoted household food security resilience. The work concludes by making proposals for managing emerging innovative mitigation strategies appropriate for future actions by the community.