Innovating Pastoral Resilience in the Future: A Synthesis

This work presented a rare glimpse into pastoralists’ drought adaptive strategies to sustain economic and social resilience and transformation if confronted by economic and social collapses. By using the same landscapes of social memory and understanding how society evolved and innovated its adaptive strategies over the past five-and-a-quarter century, the work presents a general model by integrating methods of indigenous social recollection and environmental sciences to understand how past adaptations inform the present. Combining oral sources with environmental proxy indicators successfully reconstructed a disaster history of a region where pastoralism has been a dominant economic mode of production. The work identified innovative strategies the community developed in response to multiple disasters, which we used to propose how they would mitigate droughts. The work uses these proposals to develop field schooling and training for pastoralists and farmers in lifelong education and learning experiences to improve their innovative adaptations for sustainable social, economic, and environmental resilience.