Collapse and Transformation of Pastoralism: Pathways of Land-use Change, the 1960s–2000s

The decades of the 1960s and 1970s coincided with another collapse of the pastoral economy in Kenya’s former Northern Frontier Districts (NFD). The collapse instigated by the secessionist war was followed by land-use transformation. We will use the Obbu Borana—the group most adversely affected by the war—to investigate the collapse of pastoralism that transitioned into land-use change. Following the initial war trigger, an array of drivers and the overarching environmental variability and human behavior determined the direction of land-use change. The approach reflects adaptive strategies, which depend on the capacity of the socio-ecological system to create new economic domains of the transformed landscapes. Historically, the Borana pastoralists were not farmers. They shared a grain-labor-client relationship with farming communities in southern Ethiopia. We will show how this relationship with Ethiopian farmers spurred the community’s adoption of farming. We posed five questions related to land-use changes. We described five pathways of land-use transitions to create the practice of agropastoralism. In a mixed farm-livestock production system, resilience is examined regarding periodic food production, accumulation of fodder reserves by individual farmers, and renting accumulated fodder banks. Food production is a product of a variable climate. Although farming can supply food sufficiency for three to six months, it suffers deficits for the remaining part of the time. The resilience of agropastoralism envisages that a functional agropastoral ecosystem might be due to the following factors: first, despite low yields, periodic crop production supplements livelihoods from traditional sources. Farm produce supplies self-sufficiency in terms of household grain supplies during wet years. Second, farming systems include accumulating fodder reserves that individual households can rent to earn added income. Third, privatized land is being monetarized. Accordingly, the history of pastoral collapse and economic transformation shows the first iteration of the adaptive cycle between 1963 and 2008, which coincided with the expansion of farming and the introduction of range enclosures, followed by a second iteration from 2010 to 2016 when the monetarization of land became more attractive.