Variability is not uncertainty; mobility is not flexibility: Clarifying concepts in pastoralism studies with evidence from Tajikistan

Abstract

As the “new rangeland paradigm” took shape in the 1990s, climatic variability in pastoral ecosystems was often discussed as “uncertainty”, and the essential mobility of pastoral systems was argued to be possible only with flexible land access rights. These context-specific principles have increasingly been globalized in analyses of diverse pastoral systems. While new understandings of the role of uncertainty and flexibility in pastoral systems have been unquestionably beneficial for particular contexts, uncertainty has been problematically embraced as intrinsically central to pastoral systems.This paper combines a critical review of the literature and field work in Tajikistan’s Rasht Valley to bring into clear relief differences between variability and uncertainty, on the one hand, and mobility and flexibility, on the other. This allows us to see that livestock mobility is a strategy to cope with environmental variability in all pastoral contexts. Flexibility, however, is a strategy to cope with environmental uncertainty that is only present in a subset of pastoral contexts. Importantly, flexibility is not a required precondition for mobility. These realizations carry important implications for governance in pastoral settings. Due to the many challenges of building flexibility into property systems, pastoral land governance should be developed by looking for predictability, and efforts to maintain flexibility should be judicious and empirically well-justified.

Can formalisation of pastoral land tenure overcome its paradoxes? Reflections from East Africa

“…Concepts such as variability, uncertainty, and flexibility have become cornerstones of the dominant paradigm in research on pastoralism. While we subscribe to that paradigm, it has been noted (Gillin 2021) that the concepts are sometimes used uncritically with no distinction made between variability and uncertainty or between flexibility and mobility. Much of the variability seen in pastoral rangelands occurs within predictable parameters, and some types of mobility are quite regular and predictable and do not necessarily require flexibility of access arrangements and institutions (Gillin 2021).…”

Book review of Pastoralism – Making Variability Work by Saverio Krätli and Ilse Koehler-Rollefson and a discussion of the inherent challenges of writing about pastoralists at the global scale

“…Section 1.1 on pages 4-5). As one of us has written recently for this journal, it is common for those writing about pastoralism to conflate unpredictability and variability, and this mistake has significant consequences when it comes to designing development interventions or governance systems to facilitate pastoralists' management responses (Gillin 2021).…”

“…These different types of variability require different types of herder responses, the equivalent of the 'operational processes' in this report. While the authors refer to all responses by pastoralists to environmental variability as 'variability in operational processes', the responses themselves do not need to be variable unless the environmental variability itself is unpredictable; this is why distinguishing between unpredictable and predictable environmental variability is important (Gillin 2021). Despite this, they equate pastoralists' responses to 'flexibility' or 'optionality' (Krätli and Koehler-Rollefson 2021: 6), even though many examples they give for variability in the operational process-mobility, land tenure systems, crop-livestock linkages, and urban-rural linkages-do not need to be flexible when input variability is predictable.…”

Over-reliance on water infrastructure erodes the resilience of drylands pastoralists

“…Drylands cover about 40% of global lands and are mostly inhabited by marginal communities living on mobile pastoralism 10 . Mobility (i.e., seasonal movements of pastoralists and their herd 18 ) is the traditional strategy of pastoralists in drylands around the globe to cope with climate variability and water and pasture scarcity 11,12 . Yet, it is not to be considered as a mere drought coping mechanism but a whole livelihood strategy that allows pastoralists to navigate uncertainty, change and variability 13 .…”