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Definition
Pastoralists are livestock-keepers who move with their animals, over long or
shorter distances, to find pasture and water. Often some members of the household
live in one place, while others herd the livestock part of the year. In other cases,
but this is rarer today, the whole household may move in a nomadic adaptation.
Overview
Globally, there are somewhere between 100 and 200 million pastoralists. They tend
to have a poor reputation among modern state authorities. Pastoralism is in fact
often seen as an unproductive vestige of the past and as a stage in development
somewhere between hunter-gatherers and agriculture. As a consequence of this view,
governments frequently attempt to turn pastoralists into sedentary farmers. The vast
majority of countries that have pastoralists within their borders follow such a policy.
Modern governments have a tendency to view nomadic use of resources as messy
and illegible (Scott 1998), because nomadic migrations do not fit into a modern form
of governmental organization. Pastoralists are difficult to tax and control, and it is
also difficult to adapt services such as schools and health care to their mobility.
This is, however, not only a Western perception, or one reserved for capitalist
economies. Also in China, and in the countries that make up the former Soviet
Union, pastoralists tend to be seen as primitive and unmanageable. Permanent
settlement and making livestock keeping more efficient and sustainable is therefore
considered the solution to the problems that mobility represents for governments.
This view on pastoralism represents what we may call a modernization discourse.
State authorities tend to feel a need to actively control and govern pastures and
pastoralists through quantifiable indicators. The scientific basis for this policy
approach is found in succession theory within range science that is usually referred
back to the American ecologist Frederic Clements (1874–1945). He presented his
theory in two volumes (Clements 1916, 1920), which in brief says that without
‘disturbance’, usually thought of from humans or livestock, ecosystems will naturally
go through various stages of succession before reaching climax, which is the system’s
natural condition. Grazing will disturb this process. It is therefore important that the
grazing pressure stays within a calculated carrying capacity, which is the threshold
indicating how much outtake the system can take before it is tipped out of balance.
Clements developed this theory based on field studies on the prairie in Nebraska,
which is in a temperate climate. He claimed, however, that this was a general theory
that was applicable to all climatic zones, and the theory was quickly adopted by
public administration in the USA as the scientific basis for the management of
pastures all over the country (Sayre 2017).
Even if it soon turned out that the succession theory was less suitable to describe
the dynamics of the drier and warmer grazing areas in for instance Arizona and New
Mexico, the model still dominated American range management until the 1990s.
This can be explained by the fact that it responded to a bureaucratic need of
governing through quantitatively defined variables such as carrying capacity (i.e.
Pastoralists and the State
7
Definition
Pastoralists are livestock-keepers who move with their animals, over long or
shorter distances, to find pasture and water. Often some members of the household
live in one place, while others herd the livestock part of the year. In other cases,
but this is rarer today, the whole household may move in a nomadic adaptation.
Overview
Globally, there are somewhere between 100 and 200 million pastoralists. They tend
to have a poor reputation among modern state authorities. Pastoralism is in fact
often seen as an unproductive vestige of the past and as a stage in development
somewhere between hunter-gatherers and agriculture. As a consequence of this view,
governments frequently attempt to turn pastoralists into sedentary farmers. The vast
majority of countries that have pastoralists within their borders follow such a policy.
Modern governments have a tendency to view nomadic use of resources as messy
and illegible (Scott 1998), because nomadic migrations do not fit into a modern form
of governmental organization. Pastoralists are difficult to tax and control, and it is
also difficult to adapt services such as schools and health care to their mobility.
This is, however, not only a Western perception, or one reserved for capitalist
economies. Also in China, and in the countries that make up the former Soviet
Union, pastoralists tend to be seen as primitive and unmanageable. Permanent
settlement and making livestock keeping more efficient and sustainable is therefore
considered the solution to the problems that mobility represents for governments.
This view on pastoralism represents what we may call a modernization discourse.
State authorities tend to feel a need to actively control and govern pastures and
pastoralists through quantifiable indicators. The scientific basis for this policy
approach is found in succession theory within range science that is usually referred
back to the American ecologist Frederic Clements (1874–1945). He presented his
theory in two volumes (Clements 1916, 1920), which in brief says that without
‘disturbance’, usually thought of from humans or livestock, ecosystems will naturally
go through various stages of succession before reaching climax, which is the system’s
natural condition. Grazing will disturb this process. It is therefore important that the
grazing pressure stays within a calculated carrying capacity, which is the threshold
indicating how much outtake the system can take before it is tipped out of balance.
Clements developed this theory based on field studies on the prairie in Nebraska,
which is in a temperate climate. He claimed, however, that this was a general theory
that was applicable to all climatic zones, and the theory was quickly adopted by
public administration in the USA as the scientific basis for the management of
pastures all over the country (Sayre 2017).
Even if it soon turned out that the succession theory was less suitable to describe
the dynamics of the drier and warmer grazing areas in for instance Arizona and New
Mexico, the model still dominated American range management until the 1990s.
This can be explained by the fact that it responded to a bureaucratic need of
governing through quantitatively defined variables such as carrying capacity (i.e.
Pastoralists and the State