Pastoralism, Uncertainty and Resilience: Global Lessons from the Margins

Project Information

PASTRES

Grant agreement ID: 740342

DOI

10.3030/740342

Project closed

EC signature date 17 August 2017

Start date 1 October 2017

End date 31 January 2024

Funded under

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - European Research Council (ERC)

Total cost

€ 2 499 126,50

EU contribution

€ 2 499 126,50

Coordinated by

INSTITUTE OF DEVELOPMENT STUDIES
United Kingdom

Periodic Reporting for period 4 - PASTRES (Pastoralism, Uncertainty and Resilience: Global Lessons from the Margins)

Reporting period: 2022-04-01 to 2024-01-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

The PASTRES project asked: What lessons can we learn for global challenges from pastoral systems responding to uncertainty? Together with local partners and six PhD students, we worked in six pastoral areas: China (Amdo Tibet), Ethiopia (Borana), India (Gujarat), Italy (Sardinia), Kenya (Isiolo district) and Tunisia (Tataouine area). In each case, we explored responses to uncertainty across three areas: environment/resources, markets/commodities and institutions/governance.
Through interactions with people working in different areas, whether working on banking, climate change, insurance, critical infrastructure or public health, we explored what lessons can be learned from pastoral areas for wider societal responses to uncertainty.

Our objectives were:
• Developing a novel cross-disciplinary theoretical framework
Our research developed a ‘new narrative’ for pastoralism and extensive livestock development globally. This contrasted an approach centred on risk management and control with one based on uncertainty and care. In multiple ways, across academic/practitioner/activist communities and trying to traverse language barriers through translation, we have tried to develop, share, refine and extend our cross-disciplinary framework.

• Exploring responses to uncertainties in pastoral settings
Our research took place in 6 countries led by 6 PhD students and country partners. The research examined how pastoralists live with and from uncertainty in highly variable environments, with implications for thinking about policies around mobility, migration, land-use/conservation, markets, social assistance and insurance schemes. The collective work resulted in the elaboration of a ‘new narrative’ around pastoralism, shared across many publications and events.

• Facilitating a dialogue between marginal pastoral areas and others confronting uncertainty
In 2019, together with the ESRC STEPS Centre we hosted an international symposium on uncertainty. This resulted in a major edited book – The Politics of Uncertainty: The Challenge of Transformation (Scoones and Stirling 2020, 54493 chapter requests, 157 GS citations), and a lot of interest in the theme. Follow-on work resulted in 7 collaboratively-written journal articles on themes including economics, pandemic preparedness, migration, social protection, insurance/moral economies and knowledge exchange in development. The articles were subsequently interpreted and shared in comic and animation form and shared widely (https://pastres.org/uncertainworlds/). These conversations informed the final book of the project, Navigating Uncertainty: Radical Rethinking for a Turbulent World (Scoones 2024)

• Developing team capacities, building a network and engaging with policy
Our core PASTRES team grew to over 30, including 3 core researchers, 6 PhD students, 3 country leads, 16 post-docs and affiliates and 4 communications/visual methods staff. This core group linked many institutions, beyond just IDS and EUI (the hosts). PhD students/country leads led dissemination and policy engagement work across the 6 countries, with materials translated into local languages. We engaged with the UN International Year of Rangelands and Pastoralism 2026, the UN Food Systems Summit and 2 climate COPs, bringing research insights to the table. PASTRES ‘alumni’ are now working across academic, government, UN, NGO and social movement organisations on related issues.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

The six PASTRES PhD students successfully completed their theses moving on to new jobs in academia and policy-oriented work. As a collective project, we produced an edited book – Pastoralism, Uncertainty and Development – which was published open access in 2023. This provided an overview of the findings of all six case studies and a reflection on the implications for policy. The launch of the book coincided with a major international policy conference held in Addis Ababa, co-hosted by the International Livestock Research Institute. This attracted around 500 participants. The conference provided a moment for distilling key policy lessons from the project, offering a ‘new narrative’ on pastoralism and livestock development. The event also saw our final physical exhibition of our Seeing Pastoralism photo collection. Our visual methods work has provided an excellent way into the project findings through a visual medium, illuminating local perspectives on uncertainty. The cross-cutting work on ‘uncertainty’ was finalised, with seven journal articles published inspired by the PASTRES linked to different themes, including migration, social assistance, insurance, economics etc. These were translated into comic formats and animated video. The ‘uncertain worlds’ exhibition was presented both online and physically in a showing in Brighton. The book, Navigating Uncertainty, was published in August 2024, with a workshop held at EUI in Florence on the themes of the book in October 2023. We produced a blog series summarising key findings, and at the same time the website was curated as a legacy site – including an archive of over 200 blogs produced during the project, as well as our updated online course. Final outputs from the project were widely shared as part of an input into the 2026 UN International Year for Rangelands and Pastoralism.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

The elaboration of the ‘new narrative’ for pastoralism and development challenged current thinking and practice. While this drew on long-standing work by the PI and many others, putting this together in a format, backed by empirical work from 3 continents, provided an impetus to the ideas, with wide take-up and interest. This was enhanced by top-quality communications work from our team, and collaborations with others outside academia (such as the Transnational Institute (TNI) and the World Alliance for Mobile and Indigenous People (WAMIP)) to make sure it was widely shared.

The use of visual research methods was not planned to the extent that it evolved during the project. We realised as soon as fieldwork started that this was going to become central to the research process itself. As discussed above, the approaches allowed us to engage with pastoralists, policymakers and others in ways that would not have been possible with conventional research methods. This became especially important during the pandemic when the use of remote approaches via WhatsApp, Facebook became essential and an important route for sharing images and insights within online groups.

The focus on uncertainty across fields and policy domains was central to the high-risk/high-gain ambition of the project. When we convened the 2019 symposium, we did not know whether the conversations would be fruitful, or whether disciplinary and other barriers would prevent exchange. We were amazed at how engaging the conversations turned out – between people working on migration, disease, banking, climate, disasters, crime, religion and more. This experience offered confidence to continue some of these conversations around the 7 articles on different themes that were published, and subsequently interpreted in comic form. These were more in-depth but immensely productive interactions across disciplines and policy areas. This was at times challenging, but highly rewarding. All papers (and their comics) have been very well received. The 2024 book – Navigating Uncertainty – builds on all of this and attempts to synthesise and make the bigger case.

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