Pastoralism at Scale on the Kazakh Rangelands: From Clans to Workers to Ranchers

Abstract

Eurasia contains the world's largest contiguous rangelands, grazed for millennia by mobile pastoralists' livestock. This paper reviews evidence from one Eurasian country, Kazakhstan, on how nomadic pastoralism developed from some 5,000 years ago to the present. We consider a timespan covering pre-industrial, socialist and capitalist periods, during which pastoral social formations were organized in terms of kinship, collective state farms, and private farms and ranches. The aim is to understand how events over the last 100 years have led to the sequential dissolution and re-formation of the social units necessary to manage livestock across a wide expanse of spatially heterogenous and seasonally variable rangeland ecosystems. It is argued that the social scale of extensive livestock management must be tailored to the geographical scale of biotic and abiotic conditions. The paper starts by pointing out the long duration of mobile pastoralism in the Kazakh rangelands and provides an overview of how events from the late 17th C onwards unraveled the relationships between Kazakh nomads' socio-economic units of livestock management and the rangeland environment. At present, mobile animal husbandry is not feasible for the majority of Kazakh livestock owners, who operate solely within small family units without state support. These reformulated post-Soviet livestock grazing patterns are still undergoing rapid change, influencing the composition of rangeland vegetation, wildlife biodiversity, and rates of carbon sequestration. By concentrating capital and landed resources, a minority of large-scale pastoralists have been able to re-extensify by combining mobility with selective intensification, including an increased reliance on cultivated feed. Current state and international efforts are leaving out the majority of small-scale livestock owners and their livestock who are unable to either intensify or extensify at sufficient scale, increasing environmental damage, and social inequality.

Identifying relationships between multi‐scale social–ecological factors to explore ungulate health in a Western Kazakhstan rangeland

“…For the first decade following the Soviet Union's collapse, the livestock sector received limited state attention—which was predominately concerned with developing oil and gas reserves (Pomfret, 2009). Recently, the Kazakh government has introduced large subsidy programmes supporting livestock production (Petrick et al., 2018), but these tend to benefit large‐scale livestock owners, while households (livestock owners not registered as farms) are ineligible (Kerven et al., 2021). There is evidence that many larger livestock operations have become much more mobile in recent years as they rebuild economies of scale for movement (Kerven et al., 2016; Robinson et al., 2016; Robinson et al, in review), but smaller farms and household remain more sedentary.…”

“…Adaptation needs to be a continual and iterative process and is linked to resilience, ensuring that the system adapts to new forces without losing functionality or transforming in fundamental ways (Hruska et al., 2017). These aspects are relevant for saigas in Ural and across their global range, as they are surviving in a dynamic world in which livestock increasingly use outlying steppe areas (Kerven et al., 2016); climatic changes potentially alter host–pathogen interactions (Kock et al., 2018) and resource acquisition (Pruvot et al., 2020); and state policies push towards more intensive livestock production systems (Kerven et al., 2021). It will be crucial for saiga conservationists to engage in multi‐pronged conservation interventions, which are evaluated and adapted through the lens of rural livelihoods and the livestock health on which they depend.…”

“…However, after the Soviet collapse, State Farms were broken up and herds fragmented among thousands of small private households and farms. Many people were constrained to graze their animals around villages, as they could not afford seasonal migration (Kerven et al, 2016(Kerven et al, , 2021. Nonetheless, those with larger livestock holdings increasingly leased pasture further from villages, out in the steppe (Kerven et al, 2021).…”

“…Many people were constrained to graze their animals around villages, as they could not afford seasonal migration (Kerven et al, 2016(Kerven et al, , 2021. Nonetheless, those with larger livestock holdings increasingly leased pasture further from villages, out in the steppe (Kerven et al, 2021). Therefore, we divide livestock holdings into two types: village based and outlying.…”

Grazing Into the Anthropocene or Back to the Future?

“…Well into the middle of the twentieth century, however, much of the rangelands of pastoral Africa and Asia had escaped commodification. State socialism and pastoralist collectivization held the line in Soviet Central Asia (Kerven et al, 2020) and Mongolia (Sneath, 2003), as did the Chinese Communist Party in China's western provinces (Banks, 2003). In sub-Saharan Africa, the limited administrative reach of newly-created nation states left marginal pastoral areas to their own devices, and many if not most African pastoralists gained access to natural resources by being members of indigenous political communities rather than citizens of nation states (Cunnison, 1966;Dyson-Hudson, 1966;Hoben, 1988;Bassett, 1993;Turton, 1994).…”