Introduction
Droughts, floods, locust plagues, and epidemic diseases have all affected pastoralists in East Africa’s rangelands in the past few years. How can such uncertain events, each with major consequences for pastoral livelihoods, be confronted? How are contrasting futures anticipated? What different assumptions, techniques, and practices are deployed to respond to such uncertainties?
This chapter explores the politics of anticipation – where uncertain futures are framed and negotiated through a range of technical and political practices – in pastoral areas of southern Ethiopia and northern Kenya. Two contrasting approaches to addressing uncertain futures are explored, each with very different politics associated with them. The first is a liberal, individual, market-based approach, which relies on scientific prediction forecasting, early warning, early action responses, and insurance to offset defined risks. This sees futures as controllable, predictable, and calculable through technical intervention (Scoones 2019, 2024). This perspective is associated with the management of risk, whereby futures are assumed to be predictable and outcomes controllable (Stirling 2010). Associated with a neoliberal framing of risk, futures can in turn be marketized and risk financialized through such instruments as insurance, in turn creating new forms of controlling biopolitics (Lentzos and Rose 2009, Dillon 2007, Giddens 1999). The second is a more collective, redistributive approach, rooted in networks and relationships, and drawing on local knowledges and experiences of volatility and variability (cf. Krause and Harris 2021, Krätli 2019). Such a view sees futures linked to current practices, embedded in social relations and not simply controllable through external means (Anderson 2010). This approach takes uncertainty seriously – where futures are indeterminate and outcomes are unknown – and relies on living with and from variability in a turbulent world. This perspective in turn suggests a more ‘caring’, less controlling politics (Scoones and Stirling 2020). While not mutually exclusive, these two perspectives do highlight very different understandings of risk and uncertainty and so a different politics of anticipation. This, we argue, has major consequences for the way development support, including via insurance systems, is viewed.
The next section outlines what we mean by the politics of anticipation more generally, identifying some of the key dimensions from the wider literature. The following section explores the deployment of index-based livestock insurance in pastoral areas, examining how insurance contributes to a particular style of ‘future-making’ in the rangelands. This is followed by a discussion of more vernacular styles of protection, rooted in local moral economies. Different types of future and forms of anticipation and response are revealed. The conclusion turns to a discussion of the implications of these contrasting approaches, and how different politics of anticipation – embedded in contrasting assumptions, techniques, practices and power relations – suggest quite different futures and development pathways for pastoral areas.