DIIS policy brief

A moving frontline in Africa: climate-cattle-conflict

Pastoralism is the key to climate change adaptation in African drylands, but it is threatened by conflicts with farmers, regional insecurity and violent extremism. Stabilisation and development efforts should place pastoralism at the centre by strengthening pastoral livelihoods and should include herders as peacebuilding and development partners.

RECOMMENDATIONS

■ Strengthen pastoralist capacities to cope with risk and variability by boosting inclusive and equitable resource governance in new development programmes.

■ Include pastoralists as potential peace-builders in conflict resolution efforts.

■ Support dialogue between pastoralists and local and national governments in order to prevent the further marginalisation of vulnerable pastoralist groups.

From Somalia to Burkina Faso, from Mali to South Sudan and from Chad to Nigeria, pastoralism, or the exploitation of extensive grazing for livestock, has historically been largely peaceful. It has required strong cooperation with other users of resources and local dispute-resolving mechanisms to diffuse tensions. However, the seasonal mobility of pastoralists is under threat due to intensified conflicts and regional insecurity, which are currently being compounded by climatic and demographic changes, as well as worsening food insecurity.

Escalating conflicts
Pastoralism has sustained both nomadic and sedentary communities for centuries, generating wealth and economic interdependence between farmers and cattle herders across the region. An estimated 200 million Africans, most of them poor, rely on raising livestock. Pastoralists havenonetheless managed to adapt successfully to the challenges of drylands, scarcities and environmental unpredictability.

However, on-going resource conflicts are increasing tensions between pastoralists and farmers, among pastoralist groups themselves, and between pastoralists and other groups of resource users. These conflicts claim thousands of lives across the region every year.

Furthermore, international terrorist groups such as Islamic State and al-Qaeda in Mali, Boko Haram in Nigeria and Al-Shabaab in Somalia have sought to co-opt pastoralist communities in order to seize control of extensive territories.

In Mali this has exacerbated violent attacks against pastoralists by local militias and regional security forces. While the involvement of radical groups has put these conflicts high on the international security agenda, only a small number of pastoralist populations are directly and actively involved in violent activities.

It is therefore critical to understand how cattle, conflict and climate change have become entangled across the lower belt of the Sahara, the so-called Sudano-Sahel. Without critical, comprehensive and interdisciplinary evidence for these linkages, international interventions risk producing regressive effects.

We prefer to move from drought to militia areas, because you can’t negotiate with a drought.
– Chadian pastoralist herder in the Central African Republic

Climate change and conflict
In January 2019, the UN Security Council identified climate change as a ‘threat multiplier’ for global peace and security and as a root cause of conflict. In the Sudano-Sahel, resource scarcity and desertification caused by climatic change are forcing herders to start moving earlier in the year. This has already resulted inconflicts as they encroach on farmland. However, data on climate change patterns in the area is contradictory, the links between climate and conflict are contested, and the dynamics of pastoral conflicts vary from one setting to another.

Pastoralists are often blamed for causing overgrazing, desertification and resource scarcity induced conflict. Furthermore, international donors have often read conflicts involving pastoralists as climate-induced. In reality, however, such conflicts have political causes such as structural marginalisation and predation by governments or other actors, which inhibit pastoralists in adapting to climate change effectively and peacefully.

There is substantial evidence to support the view that the seasonal movement of livestock constitutes the most resilient form of livelihood, as it is adapted to preserving and re-greening damaged ecosystems in fragile and climate change-affected drylands. Strengthening pastoralist adaptation and coping strategies should therefore be a central component of conflict resolution and long-term regional stabilisation efforts.

However, the very same qualities that make pastoralists resilient to climate variability—mobility and adaptability—have caused their marginalisation by host states and development agencies.

Governments tend to favour settled farmers over nomadic populations, and donors often prefer to deliver aid to demographically dense farmland areas over projects that might reach only a few beneficiaries in remote and difficult-to-reach areas.

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A major challenge for development agencies is therefore to give pastoralism an equal place in programming. Instead of lumping pastoralists together with conflict actors, interveners need to distinguish between peaceful pastoralist communities and ‘spoilers’ and to acknowledge how the social stratification of pastoral groups shapes their coping strategies.

Neo-pastoralist predators
In peaceful circumstances, flexible agro pastoralists are better able to cope with the increasing uncertainties of climate change than sedentary farmers, and traditional pastoralism is better suited to preserving and re-greening damaged ecosystems in climate change-affected drylands. But conflict limits the capacity of herders to deal with seasonal variability and induces desperate behaviour.

In recent years, moreover, pastoralists have had to adapt to the proliferation of weapons, the fencing off of land and the increased involvement of military and political figures in the cattle business. Recourse to weapons is a time-tested response to structural marginalisation. Cattle raiding drastically reduces the number of small-scale pastoralists, and in places like the Central African Republic there is evidence of massive transfers of family-owned cattle to politically connected large-scale cattle-owners.

For strongmen in urban areas, cows are ‘mobile banks’, and conflict is a way to obtain more cattle or to fatten existing herds on other people’s land. Urban elites contract and arm so-called ‘neo pastoralists’, that is, former nomads who, as contractors to Big Men, are much more given to conflict.

Local communities might be able to cope with small, family-owned herds, but they are unable to cope with, or resist, vast herds tended by armed drovers on behalf of local Big Men. In turn, predatory behaviour by neo-pastoralists leads to the stigmatisation of other pastoralist communities by villagers. Added to this, urban sprawl, infrastructure projects and agricultural concessions are encroaching on traditional cattle routes, forcing herders on to occupied lands.

Over ten percent of the cows we slaughter in Bangui are pregnant. Pastoralists would never sell a pregnant cow! This tells us much about the cattle sold here in the capital that have been raided by armed groups.
– Central African Republic Ministry of Livestock interview

Moving pastoralism forward
Ongoing stabilisation efforts across the Sudano-Sahel often aim to shore up national governments, extend the reach of the security services and promote sedentary livelihoods in the vast hinterlands where these conflicts take place. In doing so, they reproduce the marginalisation of pastoralist groups.

Approaching pastoralist regions and communities in the hinterlands of sedentary states from a security perspective is likely to aggravate issues, not solve them. Indeed, pastoralism harbours valuable lessons and promises for climate change adaptation and conflict resolution.

The flexibility and adaptive capacities of herders should be harnessed as a strength within an increasingly unpredictable social and natural environment. Consequently, as a key to adaptation and peacebuilding, development planning should be produced in dialogue with pastoralists’ own perspectives. Programmes should focus on resource-sharing and strengthening social institutions between pastoralists and other resource users in order to ensure peaceful co-existence. Finally, programming needs to navigate between locally meaningful contexts and scaling up challenges to pastoralist livelihood to reflect the regional and transboundary nature of the phenomenon.

Signe Marie Cold-Ravnkilde, postdoc, DIIS (smr@diis.dk), and Peer Schouten, senior researcher, DIIS (pesc@diis.dk)

DIIS Experts

Signe Marie Cold-Ravnkilde
Migration and global order
Senior Researcher
Peer Schouten
Peace and violence
Senior Researcher
+45 32698654
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A moving frontline in Africa
climate-cattle-conflict