Uncertainty in the drylands: Rethinking in/formal insurance from pastoral East Africa

Abstract

Amidst climatic and economic volatility, agricultural development and climate adaptation policies have increasingly turned to weather microinsurance to manage uncertainties, particularly in dryland pastoral and agricultural settings. While the political embrace of insurance has been cause for concern amongst those who fear insurance will undermine embedded coping mechanisms and moral economies, economists have puzzled over low insurance adoption rates amongst target populations. This article argues for an approach that scrutinizes insurance in relation to dynamic social practices and norms for responding to uncertainty. We employ this approach to investigate pastoralists’ encounters with index-based livestock insurance in Northern Kenya and Southern Ethiopia. Drawing on interview, ethnographic, and survey data, we demonstrate how insurance is understood within larger moral economies and collective imaginaries for living with and managing uncertainty in the drylands. Relational understandings shape pastoralists’ participation in risk-sharing arrangements, collective and individual decisions about livestock insurance purchase, and eventual uses of insurance payouts. Payouts also support a broad array of social reproductive purposes and investments in social and political life. As we conclude, these findings upset the binary between formal and informal insurance, revealing how “formal” index insurance must be negotiated with embedded social affiliations, rights, obligations, and understandings of uncertainty.

Uncertainty, pastoral knowledge and early warning: a review of drought management in the drylands, with insights from northern Kenya

“…Such successes, whilst no doubt worthy of appreciation, are often envisaged as evidence for the potential value of early warning systems that function in the same way in extensive grazing settings, even though food production, and thus the dynamics of drought risk, are substantively different in such settings. The shortcomings engendered by this ubiquity of approaches is no doubt exacerbated by what Caravani et al (2021) have recently highlighted as a restrictive, control-oriented risk framing, which is cemented into mainstream institutional and policy approaches across the spheres of social assistance, humanitarian relief and disaster response via various professional, bureaucratic and institutional biases including tight assurance and accountability protocols (Scoones, 2021;Johnson et al, 2023). Again, this is a framing that is closely related to donor preferences and expectations, rendering various programmes and projects minimally answerable to the populations they are established to support.…”

Pastoralism, Uncertainty and Development

“…If we are to respond to climate change, market volatility, changing environments, migratory flows, more frequent pandemics, and rising conflict, we can and must learn from those who have developed the capacities to live with and from uncertainty (Scoones, 2019(Scoones, , 2022c. Thinking about how pastoralists respond to uncertainty can be important, whether thinking about pastoral mobility when constructing human migration policies (Maru et al, 2022); designing social assistance and humanitarian relief approaches that avoid centralized risk-based approaches (Caravani et al, 2022); fostering market integration dynamics that build around local practices and networks (Nori, 2023); supporting knowledge networking and exchange as part of extension efforts to increase reliability (Tasker and Scoones, 2022); redesigning insurance schemes to support a more varied response (Johnson et al, 2023); thinking about preparedness for pandemics (Leach et al, 2022) or disasters more generally (Srivastava and Scoones, forthcoming); or even rethinking banking, finance, and economic policymaking itself (DeMartino et al, forthcoming;Scoones, 2020).…”