A cultural landscape approach to improve governance of pastoral food systems in East Africa and Beyond

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Cultural beliefs and practices associated with extensive mobile pastoralism enable people to live in arid regions. In East Africa modernization and increasing population densities combined with national economic policies have caused fragmentation of rangelands and soil degradation, and thus broader economic and ecological problems. Community-based rangeland conservancies provide a potential solution to these challenges and address several Sustainable Development Goals by providing food security and improved nutrition; restoring degraded land; conserving ecosystems and their services; and establishing more inclusive forms of governance that incorporate previously under-represented groups, such as women or young, unmarried men. Despite some successes, there is a great deal of variation both in the willingness of pastoral groups to establish conservancies, and in the effectiveness and inclusiveness of governance in those conservancies that have been established. Relationships between different conservancies in challenging times have also shown the limitations of an approach based on the functioning of single conservancies. A greater understanding of how to manage rangelands more effectively and improve pastoral food systems can come from understand the landscape of different levels and scales at play in the rangelands, and the diverse cultures and institutions for managing these resources. Attempts to establish new models of community governance and rangeland management, as envisaged by the conservancy model, need to be taken up and accepted by communities, and therefore need to be suited and adapted to the different cultural and ecological situations that make up the landscape.In this partnership we will bring together a network of researchers from economics, anthropology, behavioural ecology, and psychology with policy makers in order to understand how contextually-driven policies can be developed that effectively promote sustainable and inclusive systems of pastoral food production in a way that respects and leverages the traditions and culture of pastoralist communities, and takes into account the interactions between different levels of these systems. The project will involve meetings between researchers and policy makers, and participatory workshops with local communities in order to co-design research activities and future research applications that both meet the needs of communities and are directed towards shaping policy in an evidence-based manner. We will conduct pilot fieldwork in collaboration with local communities that will involve 3 different strands: 1) A Photovoice approach that will document the stories of local communities in producing food, their experiences of governance, and their interactions with other communities, 2) Collecting information on community governance and inclusivity, and relationships with other communities via Key Informant Interviews and Focus Group Discussions, 3) Conducting questionnaires that will aim to elucidate the social psychological factors that either facilitate or inhibit adoption of inclusive and sustainable rangeland governance practices.The project will result in the establishment of knowledge-exchange network with the immediate outputs from the project being a photovoice exhibit, community reports, open access academic papers, a project website and associated social media, and policy briefing documents. Longer term this novel interdisciplinary collaboration will help highlight the challenges pastoralists face, understand the ways in which community-based inclusive forms of sustainable rangeland governance can be established, and improve the capacity to develop more contextually-driven and culture-focused policy relating to sustainable pastoralist food systems. We will explore how approaches to establishing inclusive and sustainable governance of food systems can be adapted and applied to enhance pastoralist and other food production systems beyond East Africa.