Relational resiliences: reflections from pastoralism across the world

Abstract

Resilience is a common concept in pastoralism scholarship and policy-making, especially in dryland environments where livelihoods are considered vulnerable to frequent shocks such as droughts, pests and epidemics, and conflicts. Resilience lends itself to pastoral studies due to its ability to capture uncertainty, complexity and dynamism: key characteristics of dryland environments and pastoral systems. However, resilience has also been critiqued for inadequately incorporating aspects of power, its emphasis on individual agency and nature-culture dualism, and its problematic application in development. We build on recent sociology, anthropology, and scholarship on pastoralism to contribute to the ‘relational turn’ in sustainability science to address: How can an approach focused on processes and relations, and socio-ecological interdependence help us better understand resilience in pastoral landscapes? And vice versa: how can pastoralism offer insights about how to understand resilience starting from processes and relations? We compare different empirically grounded formulations of resilience that researchers operationalize in six pastoral case studies from Africa, Asia and Europe.

Full text

RESEARCH: A RELATIONAL TURN IN SUSTAINABILITY
Relational resiliences: reflections from pastoralism across the world
Greta Semplici
a,b
, L. Jamila Haider
c*
, Ryan Unks
d,b
, Tahira S. Mohamed
e*
, Giulia Simula
e
,
Palden Tsering (Huadancairang)
e,f
, Natasha Maru
e
, Linda Pappagallo
e
and Masresha Taye
e
a
Department of Cultura Politica e Società, University of Turin, Turin;
b
Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies, European University
Institute, Fiesole, Italy;
c
Stockholm Resilience Centre, Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden;
d
National Socio Environmental
Synthesis Center, University of Maryland, Annapolis, MD, USA;
e
STEPS Centre, Institute of Development Studies, United Kingdom;
f
Centre for Pastoralism Studies, Qinghai Minzu University, Xining City, Qinghai Province, China
ABSTRACT
Resilience is a common concept in pastoralism scholarship and policy-making, especially in
dryland environments where livelihoods are considered vulnerable to frequent shocks such as
droughts, pests and epidemics, and conflicts. Resilience lends itself to pastoral studies due to its
ability to capture uncertainty, complexity and dynamism: key characteristics of dryland environ-
ments and pastoral systems. However, resilience has also been critiqued for inadequately
incorporating aspects of power, its emphasis on individual agency and nature-culture dualism,
and its problematic application in development. We build on recent sociology, anthropology, and
scholarship on pastoralism to contribute to the ‘relational turn’ in sustainability science to
address: How can an approach focused on processes and relations, and socio-ecological inter-
dependence help us better understand resilience in pastoral landscapes? And vice versa: how can
pastoralism offer insights about how to understand resilience starting from processes and
relations? We compare different empirically grounded formulations of resilience that researchers
operationalize in six pastoral case studies from Africa, Asia and Europe.
ARTICLE HISTORY
Received 11 October 2023
Accepted 7 August 2024
EDITED BY
Seb O’Connor
KEYWORDS
Pastoralism; relational
resilience; process relational;
Africa; Asia; Europe
1. Introduction: relational resilience, gaps
and contributions
Rather than having a seasonal camp site, the Rabari
pastoralists of the Kachchh district of western India
move every few days, going from field to field, pasture
to pasture. Their camp is particularly lean to facilitate this
frequent movement. During the monsoon, when grazing
in the commons, often a clear patch of pasture is chosen,
that is free of thorny bushes and still has access to fire-
wood and water. During the summer and winter months,
fields that are fallow or harvested are chosen. Preference
is given to those farms whose owners may be willing to
offer a gift or compensation in exchange for the manure
deposit of the livestock. The leader of the migrating
group scouts for newly harvested farms and negotiates
with farm owners for such arrangements, while the
shepherds organize the daily routes of the sheep to arrive
from one camp site to the next after a day’s grazing, the
flock and camp converging each evening.
It was the winter now, late November, well after the
rainy season in the dryland area of Kachchh. Five camps
with nine camels walking along the small tar country
road. Children playing on the outskirts of their villages
turned to look at us as we passed. After an hour or so of
walking, we turned off the road into the fields and
walked on ahead into the wilderness. These were fallow
lands cleared of vegetation. Suddenly, a hailstorm came
down on us. Everyone rushed to protect their belong-
ings from the rain. The camp members quickly pulled
out some metal bars they carry and pulled up
a tarpaulin sheet over the camp’s main charpoy, dump-
ing all their belongings on the bed. We all sat huddled
under the sheet, half soaked marveling at the storm that
continued to come down around us. The women dug
a trench around the camp to keep the water out.
Everyone slept under the tent that night, two or three
people to a charpoy.
The next day, the pastoralists found that these lands
were not suitable to camp. The earth was wet and
mucky, it was difficult to walk through for both the
sheep and humans, and they were covered in mud.
More stony soil and higher areas that would not retain
water were more preferred in such circumstances.
1.1. Event as described by Natasha Maru
This opening anecdote from the Rabari pastoralists
describes the ever-changing context that pastoralists
adapt to on a daily basis, and the process of resilience
CONTACT L. Jamila Haider jamila.haider@su.se
*
Present affiliation: ILRI- International Livestock Research Institute, Nairobi, Kenya.
Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/26395916.2024.2396928
ECOSYSTEMS AND PEOPLE
2024, VOL. 20, NO. 1, 2396928
https://doi.org/10.1080/26395916.2024.2396928
© 2024 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits
unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The terms on which this article has been published allow the
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emerging from relationships between each other,
weather variability and landscape. Resilience is
a concept that has the potential to capture on the
one hand the vulnerability of pastoral communities,
while on the other hand focusing also the innovative
and adaptive capacities that enable pastoralists to deal
with change. Resilience has become an increasingly
influential concept in both scholarship and policy-
making (Reyers et al. 2022). Resilience theory has
evolved substantially from early definitions as ‘the
capacity of a system to absorb disturbance and reor-
ganize while undergoing change so as to still retain
essentially the same function, structure, identity, and
feedbacks’ (Walker et al. 2004, p. 2). Recently, some
scholars working with resilience theory have sought
to understand change through the relational networks
within which entities ‘emerge’ and are constantly
shaped and re-shaped (Hertz et al. 2020; West et al.
2020; Folke et al. 2021). It is argued that these under-
standings are more aligned with the goals of social
justice, inclusive sustainability, and climate adapta-
tion (Walsh et al. 2021). Hence, resilience thinking
remains quite varied, with important discrepancies
between theoretical advances and the application of
theory in practice in sustainable development (Reyers
et al. 2022). Numerous critiques of the application of
resilience in development have pointed to how power
asymmetries have allowed it to be applied in oppor-
tunistic ways (Grove 2018), how it can maintain
structures of power (Brown 2015; Boonstra 2016;
Coaffee and Chandler, 2017), and can expand the
influence of neoliberal agendas in the face of rising
uncertainty and compound stressors, often times
responsibilising communities and individuals rather
than states and institutions (Joseph 2013; Rigg and
Oven 2015; Chandler and Reid 2016; Grove 2018).
Distinct from its application in governance, the aca-
demic framing of resilience theory, has also faced
a number of critiques that show how it has been
regarded warily by a range of social scientists
(Olsson et al. 2015). These include theories of
human behaviour and social, political, and economic
systems that have led to a tendency of resilience
theory, which some argue is inherent to the way it
conceptualises systems, to overlook systemic power
relations (Côte and Nightingale 2012; Hatt 2013;
Welsh 2014; Olsson et al. 2015). Alternative academic
framings have recommended reconceptualisations to
challenge dominant policy-making and open new
opportunities (Macrae 2012; Leach et al. 2018), with
some, attempting to incorporate power analysis
(Boonstra 2016). Thus, resilience is perhaps best
understood as multiple and contested, with key con-
trasts between different theoretical, analytical,
applied, and normative goals (Grove 2018).
Relatedly, the notion of ‘resilience multiple’ as put
forth by Simon and Randalls (2016), holds that there
is no universal definition of resilience, and that dif-
ferent applications of the term have both different
ontological underpinnings and also include norma-
tive implications, and so should be critically exam-
ined at their points of articulation (see also Konaka
2023). Grove (2018) suggests that resilience discourse,
rather than merely serving as an apoliticizing narra-
tive of control, also creates possibilities to open up
new critical dialogues, as itself is conceptually malle-
able, and has potential for becoming ‘otherwise’ (see
also Côte 2019, cf; Chandler 2014). While some have
aligned their work (Wakefield 2020; Garcia et al.
2022; Gonda et al. 2023), others remain wary that
resilience remains inherently wedded to neoliberal,
managerial, functionalist roots (Watts 2019).
In this article, we suggest that approaches taking
an epistemological focus on relations and processes,
and centering ontological politics could help the con-
cept of resilience meet its standing critiques and
become ‘otherwise’. We explore how to do this in
practice, through our methodologies as researchers.
We build on recent sociology, anthropology, and
scholarship on pastoralism to contribute to the ‘rela-
tional turn’ in sustainability science to address: how
can an approach focused on processes and relations,
and socio-ecological interdependence help us better
understand resilience in pastoral landscapes? And
vice versa: how can pastoralism offer insights about
how to understand resilience starting from processes
and relations? We compare different empirically
grounded formulations of resilience that researchers
operationalize in six pastoral case studies from Africa,
Asia and Europe.
2. Conceptual framework: relational
resiliences in pastoral contexts
We were inspired by our work on pastoral livelihoods
and corresponding literature. As variability managers
and innovators, pastoralists manoeuvre through com-
plex environments comprised of ephemeral
resources, climatic variations, and increasing connec-
tivity across scales, from local, to regional to global
politics, markets, or climates, which are intercon-
nected dynamically (Nori 2019; Roe 2019). Since the
1980s there has been a large change of views of
pastoral livelihoods, from being seen as ‘backward’,
‘irrational’, and environmentally destructive (Brown
1971; Lamprey 1983; Le Houérou 1989), to adaptive,
opportunistic, and contributing a number of benefits
to social-ecological systems (Chatty 1972; Fratkin
1997; Westoby et al. 1989; for a review of these
changes and how they link with resilience studies,
see: Konaka 2023). This shift of views was linked
with changing ecological theory at the time, including
2G. SEMPLICI ET AL.

broader shifts in understanding ecosystem change
through the lens of dynamical systems resilience
(Holling 1973). More specifically equilibrium range-
land ecological models moved to more dynamic eco-
logical models that emphasised unpredictable and
short-lived concentrations of resources (Vetter 2005;
Briske et al. 2020), leading scholars of pastoral devel-
opment to emphasise ‘variability’ as key to under-
standing pastoralist livelihoods (Krätli et al. 2013;
Krätli 2015). The literature on pastoralism has since
embraced opportunities to learn from pastoralists
about how to live with change and to inform knowl-
edge and decision-making in various parts of the
world where tens of millions of pastoralists reside
(Nori and Scoones 2019).
However, governments and international organi-
sations often fail to recognise both the contributions
of pastoralism to the environment and society
(Manzano et al. 2021; Köhler-Rollefson 2023;
Thompson et al. 2023) and the potentiality to learn
from their knowledge and practices about how to
manage variability (Roe 2019). This is seen promi-
nently in the contradictions between understandings
of variability in pastoralism as a resource, and ‘resi-
lience building’ programmes in pastoral settings,
that often see variability as an obstacle to stable
production and attempt to control or minimise it
(Semplici 2020; Semplici and Campbell 2023). For
example, climate change narratives focused on
desertification, typical of how resilience is applied
in programmes in drylands by the development sec-
tor, can reinforce historical attempts to create stabi-
lity in dryland environments that are inherently
variable and dynamic (Ellis 1995; Hiernaux et al.
2016; Behnke and Mortimore 2016). Such narratives
reiterate control-oriented measures (e.g. such as des-
tocking, green-belts, forest planting) and engineer-
ing solutions rather than working with the structural
variability of drylands (Behnke and Mortimore
2016). Through mobile assets and livelihood strate-
gies, pastoral communities are instead able to
respond to and are indeed specialised to benefit
from variability in their production strategies
(Krätli and Schareika 2010) and as expert managers
of reliable livelihoods under variable conditions
through flexible and adaptive strategies (Roe et al.
1998; Roe 2019). Discussions about resilience in
policy and development domains, in other words,
risk limiting resilience to a purely instrumental nar-
rative that justifies prescription of ‘top-down’ state
and market-driven agricultural and rural develop-
ment policies that favour alternative livelihoods,
overlooking the ability of pastoral systems to
respond to drought and other shocks (Cervigni and
Morris 2016; Catley 2017).
In their review on progress towards applying
resilience in policy and practice, Reyers et al.
(2022) assess six
1
shifts that are necessary for
insights from resilience science to meaningfully sup-
port sustainable development in practice. One of the
shifts Reyers et al. (2022) identify as the most chal-
lenging is to move from object-oriented thinking to
viewing social-ecological systems (SES) as relation-
ally constituted. Such a shift would add to discus-
sions of a ‘relational turn’ in sustainability science
(West et al. 2020), which proposes to advance social-
ecological systems research by focusing on ways of
knowing that are attuned to ‘processes and relations
as the main constituents of reality instead of funda-
mental substances or essences’ (Mancilla Garcia
et al. 2019, p. 221; Hertz et al. 2020). It is argued
that such an approach fosters a move away from
conceptual divisions between people and nature,
society and ecosystems, to emphasise human-nature
interdependence (West et al. 2020; Walsh et al.
2021). This also enables us to better consider situ-
ated and diverse knowledges, and a critical under-
standing of the implications of resilience discourses
in decision-making (Simon and Randalls 2016;
Grove 2018). Important to note is a rich indigenous
scholarship and philosophy that long precedes ‘wes-
tern’ relational thought (particularly in the realm of
nature-society relationships), which already has
a history of convergence with resilience (see for
example Trosper 2002; Todd 2018). An approach
to resilience that is informed by relational thinking
could also create synergies with alternatives to domi-
nant operationalisations in development practice
through centering variability and rejecting control-
oriented, technocratic approaches in favour of more
tentative, adaptive, responses rooted in care
(Scoones 2019; Scoones and Stirling 2021). The ana-
lysis that we present in the following section,
informed by a way of producing knowledge (episte-
mology) that focused on processes and relations,
brought to light insights that resonate with previous
research that conceptualizes resilience as ever-
unfolding and constantly in the re-making
(Darnhofer 2020). However, through comparative
work, it also shows how the process and relations
underpinning resilience are multiple, that there are
multiple beliefs about what exists (ontology), and in
turn what pastoralisms and what resiliences are pos-
sible. Our analysis therefore also resonates with
‘political ontology’ perspectives (Blaser 2009, 2013)
and thus encourages movement of knowing and
conceptualizing pastoral resilience toward ‘a vision
of multiple onto-epistemic formations, ineluctably
co-constituted within power relations’ (Escobar
2017, p. 66). Resistant to ‘universal’ and ‘objective’
understandings of resilience, this points to the
importance of ethnographically oriented, and politi-
cally reflexive approaches that situate ways of pro-
ducing knowledge in socio-cultural and political
ECOSYSTEMS AND PEOPLE 3

context (Simon and Randalls 2016; Grove 2018).
Our attention turns to developing a comparative
methodological approach for understanding the dif-
ferent enabling or constraining conditions in pas-
toral lifeways to becoming resilient.
In this article, we argue that taking an epistemic
focus on social-ecological relations and processes,
and focusing on processes of becoming (Deleuze and
Guattari 1987; Haraway 2008), can centre resilience
as inherently socially differentiated, asymmetrically
influenced, and ontologically contested. We draw on
a long history of thinking in anthropology, sociology,
and science and technology studies that has focused
on relational concepts of personhood, entanglement,
and process to move beyond methodological indivi-
dualism as well as the dichotomy of structure and
agency (e.g. Emirbayer 1997; Latour 2005; Haraway
2008; Govindrajan 2018). An epistemology focused
on these relations can overcome limitations inherent
to approaches that have previously overlooked co-
constitutive aspects of power and neglected wider
political, economic, and social systems (Côte and
Nightingale 2012). Our epistemic focus on relations
was in particular informed by anthropology
(Haraway 2008), which has eschewed tendencies to
romanticise more-than-human interpretations of
becoming. Such approaches show how systems of
hierarchy, exclusion, neglect and violence are consti-
tutive of more-than-human processes that are consti-
tutive of identity (Govindrajan 2018). Drawing on
relational approaches from new materialism and
more-than-human approaches (Barad 2007;
Haraway 2008) could enable resilience scholars to
gain an enhanced ability to centre social, political,
and economic dimensions of resilience that are
often overlooked, enabling greater understanding of
the complex, layered factors that enable or constrain
resilience, while still sustaining a focus on normative
concerns that could guide practical applications of
resilience theory. We acknowledge also that pastoral
communities have their own worldviews and ways of
knowing resilience and uncertainty (Scoones 2023).
In what follows we demonstrate how a focus on
relationality can help clarify important processes
that allow pastoralists to navigate variability and
uncertainty at different scales of political, social, eco-
nomic, and ecological organization; in other words,
becoming resilient.
3. Methods
The core author team have each been working with
pastoral communities and systems for over a decade,
with different perspectives on resilience (we hold
a range of views on its utility as a core conceptual
tool, the above critiques of resilience theory, and its
application in pastoral development). We came to
work together as post-doctoral researchers of the
PASTRES project which asks, What lessons can we
learn for global challenges from pastoral systems
responding to uncertainty? What ties our experiences
as independent researchers together is our fascination
with pastoralists’ ability to live ‘with’ uncertainty
(Scoones 1995) and ‘off’ uncertainty (Krätli and
Schareika 2010) with vitality and liveliness, and the
lack of power this response capacity had/has in devel-
opment discourse (studies and policy).
This article draws lessons from pastoral practices
in diverse settings as studied and researched by the
PASTRES project researchers (Figure 1), including
market dynamics in Sardinia, Italy (IT); moral econo-
mies in Isiolo, Kenya (KE); insurance systems in
Borana, Ethiopia (ET); mobile practices in Gujarat,
India (IN); rangeland governance in Amdo, Tibet,
China (BO); and migration practices in southern
Tunisia (TN). In this article, we unravel the system
of meanings, interpretations, and emotions shared
around the concept of resilience by the PASTRES
project researchers, hereafter referred to as ‘case
study leads’. Their work and in-depth knowledge of
the contexts and ongoing processes provides the
empirical basis and data of the exploration of the
concept of resilience in this article. In most cases,
the case study leads are researchers from the case
study contexts and have used ethnographic methods.
Their role was tremendous in linking empirical
experiences to the conceptual debates about resilience
and ultimately in forging the arguments of this article
around the urge of a relational approach in resilience
theory and practice. The primary data for this paper
is based on two workshops in which case study leads
synthesised their ethnographic data from case studies
from the PASTRES project of which all authors were
a part of. Thus, the data collection reflects researchers
views of resilience in the respective pastoral commu-
nities where they work.
During the first workshop (Figure 2), the core
authors of this article and organizers of the two work-
shops, aimed to gather examples of applications of
resilience by the case study leads, and in turn under-
stand how they were operationalizing it in their
everyday research practices. The workshop was held
online and followed the distribution of a short open
questionnaire to the case study leads about meanings
and usages of resilience in their research experience.
Four broad questions were asked to stimulate
debate: 1) what is resilience? 2) what makes pastoral-
ists resilient in each case? 3) what important relation-
ships have allowed pastoralists to remain resilient
through time in each case? and 4) what important
changes through time have enabled or constrained
resilience? The three core authors of this article, the
six case study leads, and the two main investigators of
the PASTRES project participated in the workshop.
4G. SEMPLICI ET AL.

Our discussions sought to represent resilience
through vernacular definitions within the various
pastoralist contexts and to map these onto the ways
they manifest in everyday life. Responses and con-
versations held during the first workshop were
visually organized along spectrums of analysis, along
which, we placed direct quotes from the responses to
the questionnaire in overlapping bubbles, organised
relative to their position along the spectrum
(Figures 3, 4, 5, 6).
Following preliminary analysis of the resilience ques-
tionnaire and of the data gathered in the first workshop,
we organised an in-presence workshop with the same
participants. During this second workshop, we aimed to
explore methodological approaches intended to identify
processes more explicitly, as we identified this as limited
in the first workshop, and therefore focused on examples
of events from the various cases to strengthen our joint
reflections by means of more grounded and ethno-
graphic material. Following Hertz et al. (2020), we
defined events (Debaise 2017) as temporary stabilizations
in ever evolving interconnected processes. These recol-
lections were drawn from case study leads’ research with
the intent of shedding light on quotidian, but complex
social-ecological relations (Hertz et al. 2020). The events
are vignettes drawn from ethnographic analysis,
Figure 1. Spatial distribution of six case studies from pastoral contexts.
Figure 2. Overview of research methodology involving input from 6 different case studies, 2 synthesis workshops, inductive
analysis and visual coding.
ECOSYSTEMS AND PEOPLE 5

illustrating case study leads’ perspectives on resilience in
a time of stress, shock, or disturbance. Each case study
lead was asked to: 1) Describe an event that is character-
istic to the daily life of a pastoralist household in your
case, and 2) Describe the same event in a situation of
relative uncertainty, stress, or difficulty. Initial sketches of
events from each case study site were shared for group
discussion and then elaborated as ‘event essays’ (see
appendix n.1 for full texts). The results of the ‘event
essays’ are presented around three questions: What
forms of compounded uncertainties are described?
What processes were put in place to navigate those
uncertainties? What relationships sustained those pro-
cesses? In seeking an answer to these questions, a fourth
dimension of analysis emerged on process-relationality,
derived from Darnhofer’s approach: ‘A process-
relational approach focuses on the relations between
heterogenous elements, the relations that are constantly
made and remade, that could always be made differently,
not least through different beliefs, values, perceptions,
and expectations’ (Darnhofer 2021, p. 2). In this way, we
were able to add interpretive depth of these accounts
beyond qualitative codes of ‘relationships’ and ‘pro-
cesses’, and to explore how they might account for
dynamic, holistic accounts of human-nature
relationships.
The three first authors and core writing team led
the analysis of both workshops through inductive
approaches and visual coding (Figure 2). We experi-
mented with visual codes by mapping codes graphi-
cally in two-dimensional space and applying different
colours to different codes. Codes were refined itera-
tively while drawing from the ethnographically
informed accounts, and arranging them in relation
to each other. This process of coding produced fluid,
overlapping codes that helped us to systematically
Figure 3. How is pastoralism understood? Spectrum 1: forms of responses to uncertainty.
Figure 4. What makes pastoralism resilient? Spectrum 2: everyday practices and processes of organization and governance.
6G. SEMPLICI ET AL.

map patterns of similarity and difference in the data
until we agreed on a final diagram that summarised
these accounts, while avoiding reductionism or over-
generalization. These diagrams are presented in the
following section and are to be intended as heuristic
devices to simplify connections between multiple and
overlapping responses.
4. Results: becoming resilient
4.1. The conceptual relationality of resilience
Diverse meanings and understandings of resilience
emerged from the six different pastoral case studies.
Case study leads shared their field-based understand-
ing of resilience, namely the ways they tended to
conceptualise it from a grounded perspective, and
what definitions they found most illustrative. Below,
we elaborate on the discussions emerging from the
first workshop, and the visual maps (Figures 3–5) of
coded responses to each question. The visual maps
are brought together in the final discussion section of
this article (Figure 6).
4.1.1. What is resilience?
All responses relate resilience to uncertainty, albeit with
varied understandings of uncertainty. The first spec-
trum of our analysis, at the left end, relates to low
uncertainty, namely fluid, ongoing changes and micro
transformations, those transformations that happen
more or less consciously in daily life, in response to
smaller spatial and temporal scales of uncertainty
(Figure 3, Spectrum 1: Uncertainty). Definitions of resi-
lience at this end of the spectrum include ‘Bargaining,
reinventing, and improvising from everyday life; as well
as customizing existing rules and relations under differ-
ent contexts’ (BO), implying the fluid nature of everyday
practices in response to uncertainty. At the right end of
Figure 3, resilience is defined as responses to more
sudden, dramatic shocks involving relatively larger spa-
tial scales and more abrupt changes (i.e. those that most
commonly shape resilience debates in the development
sector, and literatures on vulnerability). This includes
the capacity to ‘Withstand hazards and shocks’ (KE, IT),
for ‘Surviving’ (KE), and ‘Without breaking’ (IT), in face
of sudden, large, and spread disasters. One case study
lead discussed both ends of this spectrum in their con-
ceptualization of resilience, e.g. to ‘Sustain livelihood (in
both normal and shock periods) without compromising
tomorrow’s demand’ (ET).
Figure 6. What important changes over time have enabled or constrained resilience? Spectrum 45: processes of reconfiguration
of relations.
Figure 5. What important relationships have enabled resili-
ence over time? Spectrum 3: socio-cultural dimensions.
ECOSYSTEMS AND PEOPLE 7

4.1.2. What makes pastoralists resilient?
Processes that contribute to pastoral resilience span
from ‘everyday practices’ to ‘social organisation and
governance’ (Figure 4). We placed responses along
the same spectrum of low to high uncertainty that we
introduced in Figure 3, read left to right.
At the level of ‘everyday practices’, local ingenuity,
expertise, and knowledge emerged as important.
These examples are grouped according to similarities
in different dimensions of livelihood-making prac-
tices (including market engagements, labour arrange-
ments, identity, and mobility relations) and other
practices of resource management. On the left side
of the spectrum of everyday practices, are market
interactions and other ways of gaining benefits from
market engagements, such as: ‘Accumulate capital in
multiple locations and re-invest’ (TN), ‘Autonomy,
partial distance from markets, health, and veterinary
system, and resistance’ (IT), ‘Benefits to livelihoods
from markets and formal organization’ (BO, IT,
TN). These everyday strategies are opportunistic tac-
tics for engaging with different organizations under
changing conditions, and for sustaining benefits.
Grounded knowledge and resourcefulness are neces-
sary for strategically interacting with different social
worlds (in both rural and urban domains) and for
responding to the corresponding degrees of uncer-
tainty. For example, cases from Italy and Tunisia
underlined the importance of ‘Knowledge of the land
access, dairy industry/markets, veterinary system’ (IT,
TN). Also, from Tunisia and India, case study leads
mentioned the ‘Ability to flexibly switch between dif-
ferent identities relative to economic contexts’ (TN),
the capacity to ‘Weave articulated labour relations’
(TN), and ‘Processes that enable or create livelihood
mobility’ (TN, IN). At the right end of this spectrum
of everyday practices, corresponding to higher levels
of uncertainty, are processes surrounding mobility
and management of environmental variability, i.e.:
‘Relations around mobility’ (TN, IN), and
‘Knowledge and practices of management of variable
and patchy resources’ (KE, ET, BO). Case study leads
described all of these everyday practices as the back-
bone of resilience in the various cases.
Everyday practices are dependent on higher level
processes of social organisation and governance.
Processes of coalition, association, and politics
emerged as crucial to be able to respond to different
types of uncertainties. More individualised (left hand
side Figure 4) practices correspond to lower amounts
of uncertainty, as these require less structured
responses, and more collective practices and negotia-
tions (right hand side Figure 3) correspond to higher
uncertainty. These include: adaptive coalitions (BO),
market networks (IT, IN), sectoral institutions’ net-
works (IT, IN), and larger socio-cultural institutions
(dedha (KE), khlata (TN), monasteries (BO).
4.1.3. What relationships have enabled resilience
over time?
Everyday practices and processes of social organisation
and governance are co-constituted by socio-cultural pro-
cesses (Figure 5). These processes run along a spectrum
from cosmological dimensions at the bottom to quoti-
dian dimensions at the top, and all were reported to be
important for all levels of uncertainty, from low to high,
which is why the horizontal dimension is not present in
Figure 5. At the top end of the spectrum, this includes
relations among extended families and lineages, caste,
clans, classes, age groups and gender relations. More-
than-human relationships did not specifically come out
at this stage of the first workshop, while undoubtedly
relationships with livestock, wildlife, and the inhabited
landscape take on a salient role in pastoral societies
(Smart 2014). More-than-human relationships were
however elicited by event narratives during the second
workshop (see Section 4.2), which allowed case study
leads to enrich and deepen their joint reflections. The
lack of reference to more-than-human relations here
highlights the constraints of thinking beyond the
human realm without the explicit prompt to think in
more relational terms (as with an event narrative).
Through the identified relationships knowledge is
shared, transmitted, produced and reproduced (IT, KE,
BO, ET); arrangements for mobility take place (IN, TN);
labour is coordinated (TN, KE, ET, IN); access is nego-
tiated (IT, IN) and multiple economies are woven
together (TN). At the bottom of this spectrum are
responses that specify dimensions of identity and cosmol-
ogy, normally overlooked in resilience programming by
the development sector (see also Semplici 2021). Feeling
to be part of a group, e.g.: ‘Being Borana’ (KE), ‘A sense of
Tibetanness’ (BO), or the acknowledged ‘sacrifice’
endured by pastoralists as a group (IT) reinforces rela-
tions and enables resilience. These dimensions of identity
are conspicuous in gendered relations of care (IT), age-
mate relations (KE), and around labour relations (TN),
but also in the sense of shared identity related to belief
systems and world views that formed the basis of specific
practices, such as moral economy and support (KE, ET).
The role of identity and cosmology in shaping people’s
relationships and corresponding practices can be under-
stood as relational values that emphasise interrelatedness
of all beings and play an important role in stewardship,
care and justice (Himes et al. 2024). We agree with Himes
and colleagues that having a clear understanding of the
different value types and the ways they are used advances
the potential for a more pluralistic valuation of interven-
tions in support of local populations (:38).
4.1.4. What important changes over time have
enabled or constrained resilience?
Each case study lead framed resilience in relation to
a wide range of observed changes that have occurred
8G. SEMPLICI ET AL.

in the context where they did research. These changes
are visually coded as an overarching umbrella that
influences all responses to uncertainty and resilience
and are often described as representing new chal-
lenges and constraining the processes that underlie
resilience. Yet, through everyday practices, social
organization and governance, and socio-cultural pro-
cesses, these new conjunctures enabled some to gain
livelihood benefits. For example, market dynamics
were highlighted as a major source of change, either
in the form of market penetration in interior and
remote pastoral lands, such as the boom of the cater-
pillar fungus economy in Amdo Tibet (BO), or
through tourism (TN, KE). Technological changes,
including ‘enabling’ factors such as improved com-
munication and transportation services (TN) led to
livelihood benefits in some cases, but ‘constraining’
factors such as increased dependency on technical
apparatus (IT) were associated with loss of pastoral
knowledge and autonomy in others. Land use
changes were occurring in all case study sites; either
through evolving land laws (BO), administrative
boundaries and regulated borders (KE), development
programming and land reconfiguration (KE, BO,
TN), or through the establishment of ‘no-go’ zones
such as conservancies and national parks (KE, BO),
energy schemes (IN), or policies of sedentarisation
(IT, ET). Through land use change, access to
resources underwent changes in processes of inclu-
sion and exclusion, with impacts on peoples’ capaci-
ties to respond and navigate uncertainty, as well as
impacts on the sustainable use of rangelands.
Conflicts (BO) and clashes among neighbouring pas-
toral groups (KE) emerged as undermining the pro-
cesses that underly resilience. These dimensions of
change (market dynamics, technical advancement,
land use, and conflict) link with broader processes
related to state politics and policies (IT, IN, BO),
political marginalization (IN, BO, KE), personalistic
policies (IN), and process of climate change (BO).
4.2. Becoming resilient: analysing
process-relationality through events
We now move to present the results of the second
workshop, in which we analysed process-relationality
through ‘events’ (see appendix n.1 for full texts, and
Table 1 for a summary).
The event with Rabari pastoralists in Kachchh,
Gujarat, India, partly reported in the opening anec-
dote, highlights how a pastoralist camp is made and
remade through processes of animal lifecycles, sea-
sonality of landscapes, land use relationships, and
processes of exchange and shared labour. While mov-
ing between different sites with variable forage
resources within a mosaic of harvested crop fields,
open pastures and thickets of Prosopis juliflora
shrubs, uncertainties are compounded in the narrated
event by a hailstorm that causes the need to set up
camp immediately. This is quickly followed by flood-
ing and wildlife predation of livestock. This event
shows how the social configuration and materiality
of the pastoralist camp emerges through a fluid pro-
cess of continuous change within the camp as it
moves in space and time, and through its negotia-
tions of uncertainties in relation to farmers, rainfall,
vegetation, and predators. In this example, we inter-
preted the camp as an unfolding process that is con-
stantly making and remaking itself. In this becoming,
humans craft and recraft the camp through their
agency and coordination of labour, but the material-
ity of physical components in the camp and immedi-
ate environment also play a role, as do temporal
fluctuations in rainfall, shrub growth, cropping
cycles, and livestock life cycles. These processes of
making and remaking the camp are also enabled or
constrained through exchange and negotiations with
land holders, as well as other socio-political factors,
such as the larger resource politics that favors com-
mercial agriculture over pastoralism. The pastoral
camp is either enabled in becoming resilient, or is
constrained as it encounters uncertainties (ranging
from everyday uncertainty to sudden shocks such as
the hailstorm).
Another event in Lumu, in Amdo Tibet in
China, shows how pastoral livelihoods are continu-
ously reconfigured over time in their interdepen-
dences between humans, livestock, pasture, and
other non-humans (i.e. caterpillar fungus, Blue-
sheep, Musk deer). However, the agency of actors
such as tourists and urbanites in search of cater-
pillar fungus, as well as changes due to privatiza-
tion of land are also influencing the ways that
livelihoods are unfolding. These new relations are
bringing different cosmologies, meanings, and ways
of being that in turn have begun to create new
uncertainties that can enable or constrain pastoral-
ist relations with land. For example, pastoralists
harvest fungi in a way that minimises damage to
the rangeland, but non-locals do not follow these
practices, as they are not concerned with the con-
dition of the land for livestock. This creates new
relations and processes where damage of land has
become a possibility due to visitors harvesting
caterpillar fungus in a way that does not recognize
local institutions that have prevented damage in the
past. In addition, new constraints on how relations
with land arise are also apparent, e.g.: ’Some
families in Lumu complained that they had to invest
more money in pasture renting, and others claimed
that increased investment in fodder purchasing due
to the increase of deteriorated pastures from over-
harvesting’. Finally, structural change, in the form
of a ban forwarded by monasteries and grounded
ECOSYSTEMS AND PEOPLE 9

in cosmology, but also supported through a range
of interventions intended to create awareness in
individuals, was seen as needed to create enabling
conditions for livelihoods becoming resilient.
In Isiolo, northern Kenya, the event shows how the
pastoral social world is malleable, adjustable and
responsive. The event describes the illness of Diba,
the household head of a pastoralist family. The care
shared by relatives and neighbours, the politics of
charity engendered by government officials and aid
agencies, and herding labour offered by relatives
enabled processes of resilience for Diba, and therefore
the entire family and herd during his illness. The
emotional feelings of Diba following good rains in
relation to the land and health of his reunited herd
show that Diba’s resilience is not just about respon-
siveness to and recovery from the stress and extreme
challenge of his illness, which left him with medical
bills and unable to care for his herd. His resilience
instead results from long-term and everyday relations
with family and friends that help care for him, help
him pay for his treatment, and help him with herding
labour and care for his herd. These relations are
examples of enabling processes of becoming resilient
and as such constantly evolving. First, his health
conditions change through time and reciprocal
exchanges of livestock follow suit. Processes of
wider community social support (harambee) evolve
too, and are used in various ways to help him pay his
medical bills and support his livelihood. Kinship is
a particularly fluid unfolding process that is part of
Diba’s becoming and ability to be resilient. However,
this becoming also includes community relations, and
other personal relations, that mobilised resources at
different times of need and uncertainty to help Diba
remain a pastoralist.
Finally, in Borana, southern Ethiopia, the event
highlights how Bokayo, a female herder, responds to
uncertainties from variable rainfall, which can
become limiting to processes of resilience when com-
pounded with other socio-political constraints.
Relational processes of resilience in this case are
mediated by market and supply networks, labour
dynamics within the household, and kin’s support
Table 1. Overview of case studies and events described.
Case Photo
Description (case lead, research project,
data type) ‘Event’ described
Main
references
Gujarat, India (IN) Natasha Maru, ethnographic study on
Rabari pastoralists in Kachchh
exploring unfolding relations around
mobility
Data based on an ethnographic case
from a pastoralist camp on the move
Maru
(2022)
Sardinia, Italy (IT) Giulia Simula, study on Sardinian
pastoralists in Sardinia on socially
differentiated relations with markets
and the economy. Data based on
qualitative study, inc including semi-
structured interviews, and
participatory observation
NA Simula
(2022)
Douiret, Tunisia (TN) Linda Pappagallo, qualitative study,
including visual methods in pastoral
Douiret, exploring relations between
migration, social differentiation, and
capital accumulation.
NA Pappagallo
(2022)
Isiolo,Kenya (KE) Tahira Shariff Mohamed, key informant
interview, in-depth narrative case
studies, from pastoralist communities
in Isiolo on moral economies
Data based on the illness of Diba in
Isiolo, and the relations around care
Mohamed
(2022)
Borana, Ethiopia (ET) Masresha Taye Tadesse, qualitative
study, empirical cases collected from
Borana pastoralists on insurance
mechanisms
Data based on the case of Bokayo,
a female pastoralist in Borana, the
relation around mediation of market
and supply network, labour dynamics
within the household
Tadesse
(2022)
Amdo Tibet,
China (BO)
Palden Tsering, ethnographic study in
a pastoral village on transforming
governance institutions, changing
relations with the land, and state-
local power relations
Data based on the encounter between
tourists and urbanites with pastoral
communities and the consequences
on land access and local cosmologies
Tsering
(2022)
10 G. SEMPLICI ET AL.

and exchanges. As Bokayo explains, ‘When rains fail,
pasture and water shortage become a serious concern
for all pastoralists’. She relies on camel milk sales, but
it is very challenging to cope with the resource scar-
city for multiple reasons. This means she has to send
her camel to distant areas. To do so, unfortunately,
she has no older children and migrating requires
experienced herdsmen. She has to take out her sav-
ings and hire a herder. ‘This has a lot of risks’, she
observes. The household herd and its resilience are
therefore a process of becoming that unfolds through
Bokayo’s agency, knowledge/experience, and deci-
sions about strategy and care with respect to her
own relations about household economy markets,
available feed, seasonality, herd splitting and forage
resources.
5. Discussion: learning relational resilience
from pastoralism
The need for a ‘relational turn’ within sustainability
science and social-ecological systems more specifically
has recently become well accepted (Preiser et al. 2018;
West et al. 2020, Walsh et al. 2021; Hertz et al. 2020). This
body of work seeks to move beyond the human-nature
duality and cartesian reductionism that is often privi-
leged in sustainability science, by centering a more plur-
alistic approach to considering diverse epistemologies
and ontologies. While some conceptual progress has
been made, the development of empirical approaches
that apply a relational epistemology to account for how
subjects and objects are dynamically co-constituted
remains a challenge (as exemplified in the debate
between West et al. 2020; Raymond et al. 2021) The
framing and analysis in this paper grapples with how to
do so in attempts to conceptualize relational resilience in
an empirically grounded way. In analysing these cases,
we struggled with drawing boundaries, creating codes
and identifying emergent analytical categories. Through
an iterative, collective, negotiated approach, we identified
enabling processes that define resilience (workshop 1)
that were then elaborated on through particular events
(workshop 2). A common feature across all case studies,
emerged during the first workshop, was the constant
variability and uncertainty that pastoralists contend
with, not just in moments of crisis, but in their everyday
practices. This everyday acceptance of uncertainty fosters
a higher capacity to respond to changes. Indeed, during
workshop discussions, there was a more widely shared
understanding that everyday uncertainty and constant
fluxes of change foster adaptation and transformation.
In addition, during the first workshop we con-
cluded that operationalizations of resilience only
gain relevance or can be used to specify meaningful
implications when discussed as situated within each
specific context (see also Konaka 2023). What is
more, the context of reference for one dimension of
resilience could not be separated from other dimen-
sions, or separated into distinct categories of analysis
such as everyday practices, socio-cultural dimensions,
processes of social organisation and governance, or
other ongoing changes. Rather, the emergent under-
standing that we reached emphasized that resilience
could only be thought of in a meaningful way as
occurring in relation to the constant interplay of all
of these multiple dimensions that are all implicated as
part of complex assemblages (Tozzi 2021). In other
words, this initial analysis shows overall benefits of
viewing resilience as itself a lens of inquiry and ana-
lysis, and as such, as conceptually relational, and
a way of understanding relative, contextually depen-
dent processes. Hence, when resilience is viewed uni-
versally, it neglects the multiplicities and
contextualities that build resilience on the ground
(Tozzi 2021). Further, this also supports conclusions
that overly generalized applications of resilience are
politically dangerous when their context of applica-
tion is not specified (Simon and Randalls 2016). On
the contrary, our analysis provides support for an
operationalisation of resilience as situated and rela-
tional, in order to reflect, preserve, and enable the
multiplicities of practices and experiences that are
important to different people while navigating
change.
We show such situatedness and relationality
through a final visual map that brings together the
visual codes we described in Section 3 (Figure 7).
These dimensions of resilience that emerged from
workshop 1 are all characterised by different scales
of variabilities (red horizontal line ‘fluid ongoing
changes’ to ‘Crisis’) requiring constant re-
assembling of how to respond to change.
We found a relational approach to understanding
resilience refocused our attention on the constant
crafting and re-crafting of daily life, and different on-
going conceptualisations of what being and becoming
resilient meant, which were meaningfully discussed
only in relation to relative variabilities and uncertain-
ties. Processes of becoming resilient emerged through
everyday practices, social organization and govern-
ance, socio-cultural dimensions, as well as ongoing
overarching processes of reconfiguration. Our map-
ping of relational resilience allowed us to converge on
an empirically grounded understanding that simulta-
neously overcame theoretical limitations and our own
personal discomfort as researchers with approaches
to resilience that we felt had inadequately addressed
issues of asymmetric social power, or that drew on
social science that we found problematic that we
describe in the introduction.
Through considering resilience with an epistemol-
ogy focused on processes and relations, we examined
resilience as dependent on context and the fluid over-
lapping of multiple domains (e.g. everyday practices,
ECOSYSTEMS AND PEOPLE 11

socio-cultural dimensions, governance processes,
Figure 7). This relational approach encouraged us to
trace enabling or constraining processes of resilience
within each case study and to conceptualise resilience
in a way that varied depending on socio-cultural,
economic, political and ecological dimensions relative
to different scales of uncertainty experienced locally.
Rather than merely concluding that context matters
or that resilience is contingent, we were able to show
how context and contingency underpin resilience
across the different cases, which revealed multiple
pastoralisms and resiliences, through an approach
that could be applied systematically. Further, treating
resilience as a relative concept that can only be
understood in specific context helped us to clarify
the question of resilience of what, to what in a way
that counter-intuitively led to greater precision in
understanding resilience. For example, in the case
studies’ emphasis on everyday practice, aspects
which are not frequently addressed in resilience
thinking, we were better able to understand how
these practices were rooted in the possible relations
and responses to uncertainty in each context, but also
to understand how different interventions have lim-
ited or enhanced these different relations.
The event analysis based on the second workshop
allowed us to expand the exploration of how moments
of being in different study contexts and how the possi-
bilities of relations and processes in each could enable
or constrain resilience. Our early attempts at coding
were limited to ‘process’ and ‘relationships’, rather
than ‘process-relational’ codes. However, by examining
events as becomings, or dynamic processes that co-
produced the seemingly discrete objects observed (e.g.
a pastoralist camp in Gujarat, a household in Isiolo and
Borana, a transforming Tibetan landscape), allowed for
a more exploratory understanding of contextually spe-
cific factors underpinning resilience processes. For
example, examining how a household herd is constantly
taking form, how kinship and care allowed a pastoralist
to sustain his livelihood while experiencing debilitating
illness, and how a camp and a landscape are constantly
subject to unfolding processes of change, helped us to
grapple with the complexity of constant transformation
and fluid adaptation in a way that enhanced our under-
standing of pastoralists’ resilience. This also served to
highlight the specific factors that constrained these
becomings. While beyond the ability of our analysis
here, these limitations are explored in greater death in
the underlying work that formed the basis of our ana-
lysis here, for example the ability to negotiate access to
land in Gujarat (Maru 2022), gendered relations around
knowledge and mobility in Borana (Tadesse 2022), and
socially differentiated relations with markets in Sardinia
Figure 7. Conceptual relationality of resilience. Across the horizontal axis, the figure represents variability, moving from fluid
ongoing changes to crisis. The constant re-assemblage of relations, socio-cultural processes and organisations and governance
are represented around this variability.
12 G. SEMPLICI ET AL.

(Simula 2022). They are also seen in state interventions
and processes of privatization of land in Tibet (Tsering
2022, 2023), limitations of state social safety nets and
the importance of moral economy in Isiolo (Mohamed
2022) and the relationship between migration, social
differentiation, and capital accumulation in Tunisia
(Pappagallo 2022, 2024). A focus on these events guided
us toward a fluid, complex understanding of the ‘what’
in ‘resilience of what’ that crossed arbitrary boundaries
that are often imposed around entities during analyses
of resilience. Events also highlighted the embeddedness
of pastoralists in processes of sharing land, labor, and
livestock, and the ways of being together with kin, land,
and non-humans. The use of and thinking through
events was however not without its challenges. Case
study leads expressed it to be frustrating to provide
a snapshot, or slice an ever-unfolding process into
a specific event for analysis. Likewise during analysis,
we struggled to find a vocabulary as collaborators that
could guide the process-relational analysis. The framing
of resilience as the constant becoming of pastoralists,
however, helped us frame and analyse the events in
more fluid ways.
The approach we demonstrate here also has poten-
tial to highlight the often-debated synergies and dis-
sonances between systems thinking and ‘critical’
social science (Turner 2014). An epistemic focus on
relations, rather, enables multiple-scales of political,
social, economic, and ecological dimensions to be
considered in a fluid way. Attention to everyday
practices allowed for a more fluid understanding of
how different interventions often undercut the very
practices and processes that enable pastoralists to
adapt and transform their livelihoods in contexts of
new uncertainties and constraints. A focus on rela-
tionality could also draw attention to complex caus-
ality in livelihood changes and resulting differential
vulnerabilities; clarifying how multiple structural,
ingrained factors translate into everyday outcomes.
For example, in conceptualizing vulnerability, which
is usually considered to be closely related to resilience
(Adger 2006), socially differentiated shocks and stres-
sors could be more fluidly considered as situated in
specific social, political, and economic contexts with
a relational epistemology (Ribot 2017). Applying
a relational epistemology, as others have shown in
studies of pastoral vulnerability, can clarify how vul-
nerabilities are socially differentiated, produced
within specific political economic contexts, and
often involve multiple compound social, political,
and economic stressors that pastoralists face
(Goldman and Riosmena 2013; Turner 2016; Unks
et al. 2019), and help to clarify the ultimate causes of
vulnerabilities. Thus, a relational approach to under-
standing resilience may open new avenues of dialo-
gue that center commonly under-emphasized
structural dimensions such as social and political
power as constitutive of relative abilities to adapt
and respond to uncertainty. The next step we ought
to see in future research, in contrast to
a responsibilizing resilience, is to link relational
approaches to a political ontology framing of ‘care’
(Simon and Randalls 2016), aligning with recent work
on relational values (Himes et al. 2024), enabling
a centering of the preservation of relations that are
important to plural ways of being (Escobar 2017) and
resonates with similar framings of ‘care’ in pastoral
development (Scoones 2023).
Conclusion
In this article, we focused on understanding how
researchers view resilience through their ethnographic
projects with pastoral communities in different geo-
graphic and thematic contexts, including market
dynamics in Sardinia, Italy; moral economies in Isiolo,
Kenya; insurance systems in Borana, Ethiopia; mobile
practices in Gujarat, India; rangeland governance in
Amdo, Tibet, China; and migration practices in south-
ern Tunisia. Through an iterative and negotiated
approach using ethnographic data across the six cases,
a relational approach to resilience demonstrated poten-
tial to address the complexity underlying pastoralist
livelihoods in a way that could help define interventions
that support rather than undermine pastoralists’ resili-
ence. This suggests that a radically transdisciplinary
approach where collaboration between systems thin-
kers, ethnographers, and pastoralist experts themselves
is needed to understand the multiple ways that pastor-
alism exists and how this contrasts with academic and
development ontologies. This closely resonates with
views of the relationship between resilience and
a political ontology-informed approach to design
(Escobar 2017; Grove 2018), bringing together distinct
and ‘non-computable’ forms of knowledge, with
a relational approach to resilience that is more attuned
to the ethnographic, but also an ability to consider
different knowledge systems as inherently situated in
socio-cultural and political contexts.
Note
1. 1) From capitals to capacities, 2) from objects to rela-
tions, 3) from outcomes to processes, 4) from closed to
open systems, 5) from generic interventions to context
sensitivity, and 6) from linear to complex causality
(Reyers et al. 2022).
Acknowledgements
We express our gratitude to the PASTRES research pro-
gramme that reunited us all and gave a home to scholars
working on pastoralism, allowed us to exchange ideas, and to
continue giving voice to pastoralists across the world. We are
ECOSYSTEMS AND PEOPLE 13

grateful to the pastoral communities in Tibet, India, Ethiopia,
Kenya, Italy, and Tunisia who hosted the case study leads,
and greatly contributed to the development of this article.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the
author(s).
Additional information
Requisite ethical procedures were followed regarding EU
guidelines.
Author responsibilities
GS, RU and LJH comprised the core writing team, and together
led the conceptualisation, data collection, analysis and writing
of the manuscript. The six case study leads were involved in
both workshops and wrote case studies (appendix A) which
comprised the primary data for this research.
Funding
This work was supported by the PASTRES (Pastoralism,
Uncertainty, Resilience: Global Lessons from the Margins)
programme under Advanced Grant funding from the
European Research Council [Grant agreement No.
740342]. It was also supported by the National Socio-
Environmental Synthesis Center (SESYNC) under funding
received from the National Science Foundation DBI-
1639145.
ORCID
Greta Semplici http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1509-5650
L. Jamila Haider http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0265-5356
Ryan Unks http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8216-7570
Tahira S. Mohamed http://orcid.org/0000-0002-9455-
800X
Palden Tsering (Huadancairang) http://orcid.org/0000-
0001-9543-831X
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