Pastoral nomadic societies in Eastern Africa are rapidly changing: sedentarisation, the demise of communal pasture management, diversification entailing increasing investment into sedentary agriculture, labour migration and growing internal stratification are the more obvious consequences of such changes. Besides high rates of demographic growth, widespread violence, state failure and the increasing commoditisation of pastoral production are named as major causes. The historical contextualization of main drivers highlights that processes perceived as rapid nowadays have deep historical roots. These often reach back to late colonial projects of resource management. This sub-project will analyse how pastoralists redefine their relations to the environment through altered modes of engagement with the landscape entailing changes in land-use, control over land and water and changing intellectual approaches to “the environment”. Frequently the reorganization of human-environmental system entails the appropriation of globalized models of sustainable resource tenure.
DFG Programme
Research Units
