Carol KervenUniversity College London UCL · Anthropology
Carol Kerven
PhD Social Anthropology University of Toronto
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67
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Introduction
I carry out field research and development work for livestock-keeping peoples (pastoralists) in rangelands . For the past 20 years I have been researching indigenous goats kept by pastoralists and farmers in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan.
Publications
Publications (67)
The collapse of the former Soviet Union signaled failure of large-scale experiment in communitarian property. Privatization reform consequently was taken as the start point to transfer the planned economy to a market economy by the post socialist countries. This also occurred in economic transition countries such as China. However, in overcoming th...
We discuss the main findings in the Special issue on Pastoralism in South Asia from the eight papers based on research conducted in the Himalayan region of South Asia. An overview is presented of pastoralism in the Himalayan region, including India, Pakistan, Nepal and Bhutan. Drawing parallels with the global stresses to pastoralists, papers in th...
Community-based tourism is key to rural sustainable development. However, information remains inadequate on how natural resource management institutions restructure community social capital and property rights regimes while developing community cooperation and tourism participation within evolving rural socio-economic systems. This study investigat...
Kazakhstan contains a large share of the world's remaining "near-natural" temperate grassland, so how the Kazakh rangelands are managed has global implications for plant and animal biodiversity, carbon stocks, and at a national level for the wellbeing of Kazakhstan's land, people and the economy. The extensive livestock and rangeland management sys...
Eurasia contains the world's largest contiguous rangelands, grazed for millennia by mobile pastoralists' livestock. This paper reviews evidence from one Eurasian country, Kazakhstan, on how nomadic pastoralism developed from some 5,000 years ago to the present. We consider a timespan covering pre-industrial, socialist and capitalist periods, during...
Cashmere production offers a new source of income for remote farmers in Central Asia where goats have long been raised. Between 2008-2018 we established a selected breeding flock to preserve, assess and improve the economic and genetic potential of cashmere-bearing indigenous goats in Kyrgyzstan. Significant effects of year, age and the sex of goat...
This study explores the drivers of site selection amongst livestock owners under conditions of increasing animal numbers following a low point in the 1990s. Our major goal was to understand whether livestock owners are acting as ‘optimal foragers,’ targeting areas of highest forage availability as they colonise previously empty areas. The results p...
Despite worldwide trends towards intensive livestock production, some extensive systems retain comparative advantages, particularly in arid regions. In such variable environments, the extent to which natural pastures can contribute to animal nutrition depends on how livestock are distributed with respect to forage resources in time and space. Anima...
There have been studies on how pastoralists assess and choose the resources required for their livestock, but little research analysing whether livestock are matched to the available resources in a seasonal migratory system by an entire pastoral community over a year. This paper reports a case study of pastoralists in Kazakhstan which shows how the...
Russian version of :
Kerven, C., Robinson, S., Behnke, R., Kushenov, K. & Milner-Gulland, E. J. 2016. A Pastoral frontier: from chaos to capitalism and the recolonisation of the Kazakh rangelands. Journal of Arid Environments, 127, 106-119.
There have been studies on how pastoralists assess and choose the resources required for their livestock, but little research analysing whether livestock are matched to the available resources in a seasonal migratory system by an entire pastoral community over a year. This paper reports a case study of pastoralists in Kazakhstan which shows how the...
There is little research on pastoralists' responses to new expansion opportunities. We explore how pastoralists in Kazakhstan have responded to rapid, fundamental institutional and macroeconomic changes. We compare use patterns of grazing and water sites in two periods; 1999-2003, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, when the rural economy was i...
Powerpoint on Pastoralism Journal's aims and scope, and relevance to pro-poor ‘Improving the contribution of livestock to human health, nutrition and wellbeing"
sponsored by Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) GmbH
Rangelands cover 69% of the world's agricultural land (FAOStats 2009) and around 40% of all global land surfaces, providing habitats for domestic livestock, wild plants and wild animals (du Toit et al. 2010).
sees sustainable scholarly publishing as an inherently collaborative enterprise connecting authors, nonprofit publishers, academic institutions, research libraries, and research funders in the common goal of maximizing access to critical research. BioOne (www.bioone.org) is a nonprofit, online aggregation of core research in the biological, ecologi...
Societies living in mountainous areas of Central Asia face sometimes unique development challenges. Remoteness, and the accompanying underdeveloped infrastructure, lack of health and education services, and restricted access to markets, underlie these challenges. Extreme elevations, dramatic seasonal differences, and steep slopes limit options for...
We aimed to quantify the sources of variation contributing to the main quality attributes of cashmere produced from goats in the Pamir mountain districts of Murghab, Shugnon and Vanj in Tajikistan. In early spring 2010, mid-side samples were taken from 194 adult females, 43 adult males and 20 castrates belonging to 58 farmers and pastoralists in 14...
In the last few years, the number of livestock kept in the Pamir and Alay mountain
villages of Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan has been increasing as the national
economies stabilized since the end of the Soviet Union and de-collectivisation of
state livestock farms. Household surveys have found that currently, poorer villagers,
owning the least number o...
This review examines the role of animal milk in pastoral economies and diets. It then considers project interventions that have sought to increase the supply or commercial value of milk from animals in pastoralist regions. The degree to which pastoralists' diets depend on milk to meet nutritional requirements, either by direct consumption or throug...
pages 29-40 in edited book, published by FAO, edited by Evelyn Mathias and Paul Mundy
Seasonal and spatial fluctuations in forage quality, accessibility and output provide strong incentives for migratory stock keeping in Central Asia. Over the past century, mobile livestock husbandry has either been suppressed or collapsed and a fragmented pattern of rangeland use has ensued. Policy shifts underlying these processes in Kazakstan are...
Indigenous goats of Central Asia and Afghanistan produce cashmere, the warm undercoat grown annually to protect them from cold winters. Cashmere is appreciated in luxury markets, but there are no efforts to conserve these goats. Commercial assessments of their fibre quality have recently been undertaken. Poorer villagers in the most climatically di...
We aimed to quantify the sources of variation contributing to the production and quality of cashmere produced in five districts in Osh and Naryn provinces of Kyrgyzstan. In early spring 2008 mid-side cashmere samples were taken from 719 cashmere adult females, and 41 cashmere adult males and castrates. Samples came from 53 villages and a total of 1...
A. (2009). Milk Matters: A literature review of pastoralist nutrition and programming responses. Feinstein International Center, Tufts University and Save the Children, Addis Ababa. Acknowledgements
The special issue of Nomadic Peoples contains special papers on 'Movement and settlement among Mongolian herders in China and Mongolia'. The paper by Wu Zhizhong and Du Wen reviews material from Inner Mongolia and concludes in favor of a return to free nomadism. The next paper by Bao Xiuxia and coauthors from China and Mongolia, using indices of ve...
Kazakh pastoralists formerly followed long-distance migratory routes each season. This was continued with state farm support
during the Soviet period. After the collapse of state farms in the mid 1990s, most pastoralists were constrained to graze
their animals in circuits around villages, as they could not afford to undertake seasonal migrations. P...
This paper documents the impact of grazing on pastures and soil composition at study sites in southern and central Kazakhstan
following decollectivization. Uncontrolled grazing and high stocking rates around settlements have produced both environmental
degradation and diminished livestock performance despite overall declines in sheep numbers in the...
Fundamental, policy-driven changes are transforming Chi-na's rangelands in response to a perceived threat of environ-mental degradation. Having transferred livestock property from state to private ownership over the past two decades, government policy is now encouraging pastoralists to pri-vatise parts of the natural resource, in the form of fenced...
We present a model of household decision-making in Kazakhstan. Traditionally, long-distance livestock migration of livestock occurred in Kazakhstan's rangelands, exploiting seasonal differences in forage availability. After independence, the rural economy collapsed and migrations stopped. We use multi-agent system modelling to examine trade-offs in...
The pastoralists and rangelands of northern Asia form a vast and heterogeneous complex.
The pastoral peoples include ethnic groups comprising many millions of people, as in the
case of the Mongols, Tibetans and Kazakhs of China, Mongolia and Kazakhstan, to tiny relict
populations in Siberia, numbering in the hundreds (see Table 1). Most of these pe...
Kazak nomads were seasonally mobile in the pre-Soviet period, in response to climate variability and landscape heterogeneity. The scale of these movements was interrupted during the Soviet period, but some degree of mobility remained. Mobility virtually ceased in the post-Soviet 1990s, but is re-emerging as flock numbers rebound from the mid 1990s...
A number of papers, evaluating the status of nomadic tribes in Afghanistan and their economic contributions are presented. The first paper by Frauke de Weijer, compiles survey and other data from a variety of sources that demonstrate the way the Afghan nomads, called Kuchi, have existed in the country. The survey reveals that the Kuchi nomadic trib...
Seasonal and spatial fluctuations in forage quality, accessibility and output provide strong incentives for migratory stock keeping in Central Asia. Over the past century, mobile livestock husbandry has either been suppressed or collapsed and a fragmented pat-tern of rangeland use has ensued. Policy shifts underlying these processes in Kazakstan ar...
in Central Asia. Over the past century, mobile livestock husbandry has either been suppressed or collapsed and a fragmented pattern of rangeland use has ensued. Policy shifts underlying these processes in Kazakstan are traced. New patterns are evident whereby some flocks are again being moved by season to different pastures. In the market economy,...
The impact of snow and ice disasters on livestock in Eurasia and non-equilibrium
The climate of much of northern Asia is dry with very
cold, often snowy winters. Vast areas of land that cannot
be used for agriculture due to cold and/or low rainfall
have been used for millennia by nomadic pastoral people
to graze livestock. There have been few attempts to compare rangeland
ecology and pastoral grazing systems between Asian cold...
This report is presented as received by IDRC from project recipient(s). It has not been subjected to peer review or other review processes. This work is used with the permission of International Livestock Research Institute.
This collection traces how pastoralists have coped with the challenges of change in a part of the world with a long-tradition of livestock keeping. Their precarious position - balanced between a market system where only the fittest may survive, and their attempt to remain a human resource for the future development of the natural pastures and lives...
"Arid and semi-arid lands cover about one-third of the earth's land surface, but nearly two-thirds of the African continent. The majority of African livestock and possibly 30 million livestock-dependent people reside in these dry zones along with the greatest and most diverse concentrations of large wild mammals in existence (Ellis, 1994). Of the w...
As pastoral systems undergo commercialisation, all parts of those systems - livestock productivity, range use, household economies and the socio-cultural system itself - adjust to the new goals of production. This paper considers one of the elements in this adjustment, that of the changing role of labour. The evidence is compared from different Afr...
Vita. Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Toronto, 1977. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 431-449). Microfiche of typescript.