Mobility and Sustainability: A Computational Model of African Pastoralists

Abstract

This article offers a simple computational model of mobile pastoralists. Employing an agent-based modeling (ABM) approach, the model explicitly simulates the movement patterns of pastoralists and computes the resultant natural resource access for a landscape that shows the typically unpredictable dynamics of African rangeland ecology. Extensive simulations reveal a striking level of efficiency in the exploitation of resource endowments that mobile pastoralists can achieve in otherwise inhospitable environments. The simulations also illuminate the serious welfare consequences of the disruption of pastoral mobility under tight land constraints. These quantitative results are consistent with the rich qualitative evidence from the empirical literature on African pastoralism. Moreover, the article reports on several sets of 'policy experiments' that evaluate the effect of rangeland interventions on the mobility and livelihoods of pastoralists. These endeavors will pave the way for empirically richer and more policy-relevant analyses of dryland pastoralism.

A Framework to Tackling the Synchrony between Social and Ecological Phases of the Annual Cyclic Movement of Transhumant Pastoralism

“…This mobile strategy of different human societies is well documented worldwide. Many studies explored a range of features, such as archaeological evidences [19,20], socioeconomic characterisations [21][22][23], traditional ecological knowledge of these pastoral communities [24][25][26][27][28], biophysical variability, pastoral rights and access to resources [29,30], migratory routes, landscape connectivity and transhumant networks [18,[31][32][33][34], challenges and future scenarios of global or regional change [12,[35][36][37][38][39]. With respect to methodologies aimed at estimating spatial and temporal dimensions of pastoral mobility, recent studies have focused on tracking migratory roads [31], characterising movements and connectivity networks between fragmented pasturelands [18,32], and simulating movements according to varying fodder supply [33].…”