In Search of Order: Institutional Change, Violent Regulation and Environmental Knowledge under Conditions of Rapid Social Ecological Change

Applicant Professor Dr. Michael Bollig
Subject Area Social and Cultural Anthropology and Ethnology
Term from 2010 to 2017
Project identifier Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 165405448
 

Project Description

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
Subproject of FOR 1501:  Resilience, Collapse and Reorganisation in Social-Ecological Systems of East- and South Africa's Savannahs