Reframing Rangeland Sustainability Science

Triangulating Ecological Variability, Pastoralist Livelihoods, and Knowledge Systems in Kenya

A wide range of social science research has shown how the expertise of pastoralists enables them to thrive in highly variable rangeland environments, often modifying their livelihood practices in complex ways in response to new social, political, economic, and biophysical uncertainties. However, due to numerous disciplinary and conceptual divides, these understandings remain largely absent from analyses of landscape ecology in rangelands. In this talk, Dr. Ryan Unks briefly outlines a conceptual framework for integrating research on pastoralist livelihoods into landscape ecology through a focus on differentiated access to ecologically variable resources, processes of control of resource access, and asymmetries in power relations that shape dominant rangeland research paradigms. He then distills findings from ethnographic analysis of livelihood change and access to resources in two contexts in Kenya. He compares the changes in land use to patterns of variability in rainfall and vegetation productivity using remotely sensed data. He then summarizes the most salient political, economic, and social relations that have influenced changes in relations with land and how this has restructured landscape processes in recent decades. A legacy of interventions by the colonial authority, the post-independence ‘state,’ as well as ‘non-state’ actors have created spatial controls on mobility that have partitioned landscapes and tended to concentrate pastoralist access within the most arid, variable, and least productive areas. Access to resources has also been strongly determined by factors such as market interactions, new economic and political relationships, and changing norms of mutual assistance. These processes have created gradients of land use that today are intertwined with multiple changes in landscape ecological process. Pastoralist elder experts, whose views are often marginalized in land-use decision making, regularly emphasize dimensions of variability and heterogeneity that highlight the lack of adequate considerations of scale in dominant rangeland knowledge production. Ryan argues that landscape ecologists should increasingly draw from a wider range of social science concepts and methods to understand the complex political, social, and economic processes that shape livelihood systems and landscape processes. He argues that this will lead to both improved selection of observational scales and a more reflexive consideration of knowledge production processes.