Vernacular protections: moral economy and local responses

For example, the tradition of stock sharing provides a mechanism of spreading risk (as well as herding labour) for limited payment (sometimes a heifer). Equally, redistributive approaches such as dabare (a stock loan and transfer of right to use, sell and own all the male produce while keeping the heifer for the owner) and amesa (the transfer of right to milk a certain animal for an agreed time limit) allow for herds to be split and reassigned across a number of often loosely connected families (Dahl 1979, Mohamed 2023). This allows the original owner to build up their herd, but also others, while herding labour is more evenly distributed across households. Livestock as property can be held in different ways, with singular, individual ownership not the standard (Khazanov and Schlee 2012). For example, ‘fiig ola kennaat’ (stock friendship) allows a herd owner to transfer some livestock to ‘friends’ and disperse the remaining herd or flock. In case any calamity (drought, raid, or animal disease) affect the ones managed by the owner, then stock with friends are recalled. All these approaches of joint ownership, sharing, and redistribution based on collective solidarities run counter to the ideology of individualism at the centre of the market-based approaches of insurance.

A strong discourse of community and ethnic solidarity is voiced, despite the increasing individualisation and fragmentation of pastoral societies. For example, a Kenyan pastoralist having suffered losses of livestock through raiding a few years earlier explained how he drew on ‘the greater Borana’ as well as immediate kin to replenish his decimated herd:

In the same way, another herder who lost animals to drought explained how their family’s herds recovered:

In the eyes of pastoralists, uncertainties are expected and local cultures and practices must address them. Q, a female 38 year-old pastoralist from Borana, Ethiopia, explained:

These vernacular understandings contrast with a calculative logic of insurance, where an individual hazard is defined and its likelihood of occurrence is predicted. In the pastoral drylands, multiple logics therefore collide. There are religious understandings that droughts or other occurrences are simply ‘God’s will’, part of a predestined fate. And this is combined with practical reasoning accepting that survival requires deploying a multitude of strategies in the hope that some work. Careful observation, scouting out of alternatives and then flexibly adapting and muddling through allows the worst to be avoided.

Generating reliability in pastoral systems (cf. Roe 2020) requires wide knowledge of system properties through long experience, shared widely through local networks, combined with adaptive practices – such as movement, stock redistribution, and establishing trading relations with smallholders for exchange of livestock with farmland, part of wider ‘caring’ relationships central to pastoralism (Scoones 2023b). For example, when a particular rangeland suffers a rainfall deficit in a particular year – actually a very likely occurrence in a non-equilibrium environment (Behnke et al. 1993) – the response is not to throw up your hands and wait for assistance (or an insurance pay-out) but to move. But mobility is increasingly constrained in these areas today, with infrastructure development, the expansion of farming and wildlife areas and conflict with neighbours hemming people in.

Movement has to be negotiated, with scouts sent out from herders’ camps to nearby areas to see if fodder and water is available, and how many others are competing for the resource. Motorbikes enhance transport to such areas, while mobile phones mean that scouts can report back and mobilise others. As explained by CD from Korbesa, Isiolo in November 2019:

This is not done individually, but as a group with many families working together. Strong social and political relations are forged across large areas, reinforced by political connections and a sense of wider political and ethnic solidarity. This allows livestock movement to occur or resources, such as water, to be accessed. AJ from Merti, Isiolo commented in February 2020:

Exploiting variability in rangelands – both in quantity and quality – is an essential facet of pastoralists’ strategies for living with and from uncertainty (Krätli and Schareika 2010). Uncertainty is not seen as a singular risk or hazard, but as a complex of intersecting factors central to how variabilities are experienced. The lived, everyday encounters with uncertainty suggest a different sense of time. The standard risk management approach – as encapsulated in the insurance response – implies a response to a single discrete event as part of a long-running sequence of similar events of varying probability, stretching into a well-defined, predictable future, at least as suggested by long-run models. This view of time and the future reflects a liberal sensibility, where an open-ended future of possibility and improvement exists (Dillon 2007). Under such a perspective, the challenges of everyday life do not intervene and risks can be separated out, controlled, and managed through expert intervention and market-based mechanisms, including insurance. For many pastoralists, by contrast, such notions of manageable futures, calculable time, and predicted outcomes are less relevant, as temporalities are multi-layered, nonlinear, and contingent (Adam 2013, Bear 2016), with a very different outlook on what futures might be. Instead, everyday, in-the-moment challenges must be negotiated as an immediate priority in a highly variable environment (cf. Maru 2020).

Many poorer, marginalised people must therefore respond to ‘slow emergencies’ (Anderson et al. 2020), where alternative options are limited. The possibilities of an ‘advanced modernity’ with open futures are not evenly distributed, and many must struggle, cope and suffer selective and sustained structural violence (Mbembe 2001). Day-to-day responses to uncertainty therefore are conditioned by structural vulnerabilities, inflected by class, race, gender, and age, and temporalities tend to be short-term, repetitive, and constraining. Challenges are not defined in terms of singular ‘events’ that can be ‘managed’ as risks, but as overlapping, cumulative, ordinary experiences of uncertainty. These often emerge slowly as a generalised emergency characterised by ‘attritional lethalities’, rather than sudden, distinct crises and disasters (Anderson et al. 2020: 12). As a pastoralist livestock trader from Borana explained in March 2020, multiple uncertainties intersect:

By contrast, the anticipatory logics of early warning and insurance systems assume a particular temporality and style of response, based on predictive managerialism. However, in practice most pastoralists must struggle with such intersecting vulnerabilities with overlapping, slowly evolving threats, which are not understood as distinct events. This results in a very different logic, more attuned to adaptive learning and response than the standardised emergency disaster systems so often promulgated by aid agencies and governments. A pastoralist in Merti, Isiolo explained how they survived the 2017 drought:

This type of collective response, rooted in cultural forms of sharing and redistribution and responding to risks and uncertainties over time not as discrete events, can be seen in terms of what James Scott described as ‘moral economy’ (Scott 1977). In his terms, a ‘subsistence ethic’ overrides other logics, and a commitment to a peasant way of life ensures that market mechanisms do not overwhelm and subsume locally attuned practices. The type of responses so well described for Borana pastoral systems (cf. Dahl 1979, Coppock 1994) are all examples of forms of moral economy. However, it is equally important not to reify such cultural, community-based responses. As discussed above, not everyone can engage in stock sharing, nor can everyone rely on collective, redistributive practices. Pastoralist just as peasant societies are highly differentiated, and a simplistic, populist interpretation is limiting, as people must combined different strategies, some individualised, some collective; some part of marketized relations, others linked to local moral economies (Scoones 2021).

While in the past community solidarities were very evident, today divisions between rich and poor, men and women, young and old, town dwellers and others are very striking, both in Ethiopia and Kenya. For example, following the 2017 raid in Merti, Isiolo, it was easy for the rich pastoralists to recover. The first recovery process was the return of loaned livestock. In addition, the rich participate more in communal redistribution in good times and therefore have ‘good face’ among the community and they have upper hand in securing herds from communal restocking (hirba). Just as with the selective adoption of insurance, a local political economy is evident that results in diverse responses.

Moral economies are always changing, and new forms of solidarity may emerge, rooted in social relations and reinforced by cultural norms and local institutions. As new uncertainties emerge, such collective arrangements must change. For example, with the emergence of COVID-19 in pastoral areas, the groupings that before helped out others in herding and stock redistribution are now working together to provide clean water for handwashing or food for those affected by movement restrictions (Mohamed 2020, Simula et al. 2021). Flexible, responsive arrangements are therefore key in local moral economies. With uncertainty – and even more with ignorance – you do not know what will hit you, your friend, or relative next. Investing in social, institutional, and political relationships that can be drawn on when unexpected challenges – often complete surprises – arise is essential. Such relationships can be mobilised quickly even if dormant for a while and can be applied to a diversity of situations.

The contrasting approaches of individualised insurance and vernacular, collective responses, however, should not be seen as exclusive – someone may take out insurance for one set of perceived risks, while still investing in social relationships that support a wider response to uncertainty. Depending on people’s circumstances, they may combine insurance with other collective responses. As SG from Borana explained in June 2020:

For others, like LD, a female pastoralist from Borana, livestock insurance is combined with farming: when she invests more on insurance, she increases the cultivated land and changes the type of crop from maize (mainly for consumption) to teff (solely for the market).

The point is that the responses are different, focused on different things, with different temporalities and different local political economies, resulting in some gaining, while others lose out. Table 11.1 very briefly summarises some of the contrasts between index-based insurance and local moral economy responses highlighted in our explorations in this chapter, and the implications for the politics of anticipation seen in the pastoral drylands of East Africa (for further discussion, see Johnson et al. 2023).

A politics of anticipation thus contrasts two strikingly different responses – a singular, individualised, market-based approach such as insurance with more collective, socially-embedded moral economy responses. As we have seen, relying on more flexible, adaptive, vernacular moral economies can result in more effective and immediate responses to uncertainty, and even be ready to tackle ignorance and complete surprise. This contrasts with the individualised approach through insurance, currently being vigorously promoted as part of drought solutions across the region. These may have their place, in combination with the existing array of drought responses, but the danger is that they crowd-out alternatives with external development efforts – such as major World Bank-supported programmes unfolding across the region - focusing on marketized, financialized mechanisms, such as index-based insurance – to the exclusion of more locally-embedded alternatives. Unfortunately, such collective moral economy approaches are largely not on the radar of external agencies and governments, although remain central to the day-to-day responses of pastoralists, as our research has shown (Johnson et al. 2023, Scoones 2023a, b).