Reflections from the Drylands Summer School 2025
Darmi Jattani and Jackson Wachira
Pastoralism is a product of climate change. It is an adaptive strategy in a highly variable environment. Over centuries, pastoralism has evolved through global environmental shifts, proving itself as a highly dynamic and resilient livelihood system. It is not merely about livestock herding as often depicted in popular media; it is a complex form of natural resource management that balances pastures, livestock, and people in a delicate ecological dance.
Given this adaptability, it is worth asking: what explains the sustained survival of pastoralism over the years across regions?
This was one of the key questions explored at the Drylands Summer School 2025, which brought together renowned drylands researchers and scholars, along with more than thirty Master’s and PhD students from across the Horn of Africa. The school, held in February 2025 in Isiolo – one of the key arteries of northern Kenya rangelands – shed light on the role of customary knowledge in grazing models and critical infrastructures that ensure resource use is optimized. It emphasized anticipatory governance, where pastoralists predict and respond to environmental changes well before they occur and as they happen; the moral economy of sharing and solidarity, where collective survival takes precedence over individual gain; and pastoralists’ capacity to transform variability into resilience, treating uncertainty not as a threat but as an integral part of the system. Moreover, it introduced participants to the art and science of qualitative research, exploring how this approach can provide the missing depth in understanding pastoralism. In this blog, we draw on the learnings from the school to reflect on the characteristics of pastoralist systems that make them particularly relevant for qualitative research.
Negative narratives on pastoralism and why they thrive
Existing evidence demonstrates that pastoralism is a viable production system, one that has adapted through species diversification, sophisticated grazing models, skilled decision-making by high-reliability professionals, and a well-structured system of early warning, and security for grazing lands. Yet, despite a growing body of research debunking the misconception about pastoralism, negative narratives persist. Mainstream narratives, for instance, frames pastoralism as unproductive, environmentally destructive and even a source of conflict. Moreover, with increasing climate crises such as prolonged droughts, and unpredictable rainfall patterns, there is a growing push by external actors for pastoralists to diversify livelihoods or even abandon pastoralism altogether. These narratives do not persist due to a lack of evidence but rather persist by design.
Pastoralists have long been excluded from mainstream research and policy making processes, not because their knowledge is irrelevant, but because conventional policy interventions fail to capture the full picture. This is where qualitative research emerges as a game changer, not a silver bullet, but an effective tool for understanding pastoral contexts and shifting outdated narratives.
The potential for qualitative research to enhance understanding of pastoral resilience
Qualitative data collection methods such as focus group discussions and key informant interviews, that rely on listening to oral histories and lived experiences, allow researchers and policy actors to trace how communities have adapted to past weather patterns or conflicts. Ethnographic methods support long term engagement, enabling observation of how decisions around migration, grazing and livestock species are made on a daily basis, often in response to subtle environmental cues. This deepens understanding of pastoral frameworks for interpreting and responding to change. Participatory mapping and community timelines, on the other hand, provide rich insight into how resources are used and governed over time, how mobility routes are negotiated and how conflict is resolved through customary systems. These approaches make visible the deeply rooted systems of local knowledge that underpin pastoral life. In other words, qualitative research creates space for the agency of pastoral communities and offers an entry point for learning from their practices to surface alternative theoretical and policy perspectives. Unlike standardized quantitative methods, qualitative approaches bring forward context, relationships, and memories, elements that often elude conventional measurement but are central to understanding the resilience and complexity of pastoralism.
The strengths of qualitative research, combined with the unique way of life of pastoral communities present an opportunity to use this method in understanding pastoralism and addressing the tension between policies and local knowledge and practices. Below, we reflect on the characteristics of pastoralist systems that make them particularly relevant for qualitative research.
i) Oral tradition: the strength of pastoral knowledge
Pastoralists are storytellers. Knowledge in pastoral societies is typically not written down;it is spoken, performed, and practiced. More than cultural expressions, oral traditions serve as repositories of deep ecological knowledge, passed down through generations.
One of the most overlooked aspects of pastoral knowledge is the role of high-reliability professionals—elders, herders, traditional healers, and forecasters—who serve as custodians of critical decision-making. These professionals possess skills in interpreting environmental cues, predicting droughts, managing livestock diseases, and ensuring community well-being. Their expertise, deeply rooted in indigenous knowledge systems, as highlighted in evidence, ensures that pastoralists remain resilient by managing risk and uncertainty. Recognizing and supporting high-reliability professionals can reinforce internal pastoral networks, ensuring that resilience building initiatives are grounded in local realities rather than imposed external solutions.
Yet, this wealth of knowledge is often invisible in traditional research approaches. Standardized surveys and models cannot capture the depth and nuances embedded in oral traditions. This is where qualitative research makes a difference. It emphasizes direct engagement and in-depth understanding. This approach not only enriches the empirical data but also ensures that policies and interventions are informed by the lived experiences and indigenous knowledge of pastoralists, fostering more effective and culturally appropriate support mechanisms. When indigenous knowledge is integrated into broader resilience-building efforts, it strengthens rather than replaces existing adaptive mechanisms.
ii) Going to where the stories are
Understanding pastoralism requires proximity. It requires engagement with landscapes typically shaped by mobility, seasons, and shifting environmental conditions. Yet, much of the policy on pastoralism is developed from a distance, policy frameworks drafted in national capitals, datasets analyzed in government institutions, without ever stepping into the spaces where pastoral life unfolds. The result? A disconnection between policy and the lived realities of pastoralists. While there have been growing efforts toward more inclusive and participatory approaches in recent years, these remain uneven. This disconnect results in misinformed policies and poorly designed projects that impose solutions without real engagement. Effective policy cannot be written in isolation—it must be integrated into existing systems and practices.
Qualitative research has the potential to transform this disconnect. It rejects narratives and assumptions, insisting on direct engagement with pastoralists in their own spaces. This immersive approach allows researchers to observe patterns, understand decision-making processes, and uncover nuances that surveys alone cannot capture. Going to where the stories are does more than improve the quality of data, it transforms policy formulation itself, shifting it from an extractive exercise to a collaborative endeavor that integrates and prioritizes pastoral voices.
Pastoralists are often perceived as reserved or difficult to reach, but this is largely due to historical exclusion and misrepresentation. When approached with genuine curiosity, they are willing to engage, share their knowledge, and challenge misconceptions. The problem is not that pastoralists are inaccessible but the failure of policy actors to make themselves accessible to pastoralists.
iii) Acknowledging variability: there is no one-size-fits-all solution
One of the greatest pitfalls in policy is generalization. Not all livelihood systems work the same. A one-size-fits-all approach ignores the vast differences across diverse groups. Livelihoods, risks, and adaptation strategies differ based on geography, climate, and social structures. Policies that work for settled agriculture and agro-pastoralists may be irrelevant or even harmful to mobile herding communities. Quantitative data, if used alone, risks flattening these differences, averaging diverse realities into misleading general trends. The outcome is policies that miss the mark, failing to align with pastoralist needs. Despite the emergence of new policy narratives more friendly to pastoral livelihoods and territories, there remains an underlying sense of battle against uncertainty through establishment of new forms (that struggle to align with the realities of pastoral life) of predictability and control.
Qualitative research avoids this trap by embracing variability rather than erasing it. Instead of forcing pastoralists into rigid existing frameworks, it allows for depth, nuance, and specificity. Participatory approaches and standard qualitative tools allow for documentation of local adaptations, ensuring policies reflect real diversity rather than imposed uniformity.
Pastoralists are the true experts, they are knowledge holders, environmental stewards, and skilled risk managers. Their expertise in land management, climate adaptation, and conflict resolution has been honed over centuries. Yet, development interventions and resilience building efforts often overlook this expertise, favoring externally imposed solutions that frequently fail. Treating pastoralists as partners in policy formulation rather than a tick-the-box requirement ensures that policies reflect their realities rather than external assumptions.
Pastoralists are already adapting, innovating, and making informed decisions based on deep ecological knowledge. The role of policymakers should not be to replace this knowledge, but to learn from it, support it, and integrate it into broader development strategies.
From debate to action: shaping the new narrative through research
For decades, there has been the debate on livestock and climate change. Extensive and low impact livestock systems like pastoralism are increasingly grouped together with industrial systems in discussions about climate change. Pastoralism has been framed as inefficient, environmentally harmful, and economically unviable. These narratives persist not because they are true, but because they are based on one sided and poorly contextualized numbers. If research is to play a role in shifting these narratives, it must go beyond counting; it must listen to pastoralists themselves.
If resilience is the goal, then the future of pastoralism must be shaped by those who practice it, not by outsiders imposing preconceived solutions. Moving beyond the numbers means engaging, listening, and ensuring that pastoralists themselves are at the core of policy formulation processes that affect their livelihoods. Qualitative research allows us to move beyond statistics and into the lived experiences, relationships, and strategies that define pastoral life. If we want effective policies and meaningful resilience-building efforts, we must start by listening.
The ‘Drylands summer school’ – exploring local constructs of resilience in the face of shocks and uncertainties in the drylands – was held in Isiolo, Kenya from 23-28 February 2025. It was co-organized by the Center for Research and Development in the Drylands, the Jameel Observatory for Food Security Early Action and the Feinstein International Center at Tufts University, with financial support from the Australian Center for International Agricultural Research and Community Jameel.
Bio
Darmi Jattani is a research-oriented policy analyst currently pursuing a Master’s in Economic Policy and Management at Kenyatta University. Her work explores intersection of public finance, gender responsive research, and policy advocacy.
Jackson Wachira is a social-economic researcher with interests in dryland ecosystems. He is currently the Research and Program Manager at CRDD.