Télédétection et ressources en eau/Remote sensing and water resources
181
B. TESTING THE CONCEPTS; THE PILOT STUDY AREA
This paper reports ongoing research in the form of a pilot study of limited scale in which the
concepts and tools outlined above are being tested. The pilot study is being carried out at a
mapping scale of 1:25 000, based on digital SPOT imagery, over an area of 1 000 km
2 around
Lake Baringo, Kenya. The study is now in its third year. Mean annual rainfall is 650 mm, but is
bimodal in distribution, limiting the effective length of the growing season. There are three
principal ethnic groups in the area; one solely pastoral, one agropastoral, and one principally
agricultural. Participation in the market economy has been growing rapidly since the paving of
the road to Nakuru in the early 1980s. There is a lack of grazing, at the same time as decreasing
herd movement due to labour shortages as children are sent increasingly to school and hence great
pressure on natural resources. Land adjudication, on a group ownership basis, is currently taking
place. Over the last 15 years there have been three major WH projects in the area, for crop, tree,
and range production. This unusual concentration, variety, and range of approaches in one place,
and dealing with ethnic groups of different degrees of pastoral orientation, makes the study site
particularly attractive for methodology development.
THE CURRENT STATE OF SOCIAL RESEARCH IN THE PILOT STUDY AREA
As most of the fieldwork so far has concentrated on the development of methodological tools for
assessing physical suitability, substantive conclusions cannot yet be reached on the social side.
Interaction with local people, however, along with visits to project sites clearly indicates that the
WH projects in the study area succumbed to many of the planning errors listed above in the social
arena. Current research is concentrating on testing the operational viability of the principles,
techniques and software outlined above. In particular, the link between ALES and IDRISI is
being explored, incorporating comparative, interactive and iterative image interpretation with
different strata/interest groups among the local populace in the field, as well as the decision
making under uncertainty tools which are an impressive asset of IDRISI. The main problem in
fully taking advantage of ALES is the requirement of economic data in order to decide between
LUTs on financial grounds, as such data [and particularly anything related to livestock] has
proven to be a very sensitive issue and thus difficult to quantify.
The usefulness of ‘scenario building’ with each social response unit is also being explored, in
order to compare concepts of the landscape/resources and perceptions of space between SRUs
[delimited principally on ethnic/degree of mobility grounds, but also within each ethnic group on
the basis of age set, etc.] using IDRISI. Scenario building is also being used to hopefully predict
the effects of different outcomes on each SRU for a range of possible WH systems in the form of
georeferenced Cost Benefit Analyses and Social Impact Assessments [see fig. 1].
181
B. TESTING THE CONCEPTS; THE PILOT STUDY AREA
This paper reports ongoing research in the form of a pilot study of limited scale in which the
concepts and tools outlined above are being tested. The pilot study is being carried out at a
mapping scale of 1:25 000, based on digital SPOT imagery, over an area of 1 000 km
2 around
Lake Baringo, Kenya. The study is now in its third year. Mean annual rainfall is 650 mm, but is
bimodal in distribution, limiting the effective length of the growing season. There are three
principal ethnic groups in the area; one solely pastoral, one agropastoral, and one principally
agricultural. Participation in the market economy has been growing rapidly since the paving of
the road to Nakuru in the early 1980s. There is a lack of grazing, at the same time as decreasing
herd movement due to labour shortages as children are sent increasingly to school and hence great
pressure on natural resources. Land adjudication, on a group ownership basis, is currently taking
place. Over the last 15 years there have been three major WH projects in the area, for crop, tree,
and range production. This unusual concentration, variety, and range of approaches in one place,
and dealing with ethnic groups of different degrees of pastoral orientation, makes the study site
particularly attractive for methodology development.
THE CURRENT STATE OF SOCIAL RESEARCH IN THE PILOT STUDY AREA
As most of the fieldwork so far has concentrated on the development of methodological tools for
assessing physical suitability, substantive conclusions cannot yet be reached on the social side.
Interaction with local people, however, along with visits to project sites clearly indicates that the
WH projects in the study area succumbed to many of the planning errors listed above in the social
arena. Current research is concentrating on testing the operational viability of the principles,
techniques and software outlined above. In particular, the link between ALES and IDRISI is
being explored, incorporating comparative, interactive and iterative image interpretation with
different strata/interest groups among the local populace in the field, as well as the decision
making under uncertainty tools which are an impressive asset of IDRISI. The main problem in
fully taking advantage of ALES is the requirement of economic data in order to decide between
LUTs on financial grounds, as such data [and particularly anything related to livestock] has
proven to be a very sensitive issue and thus difficult to quantify.
The usefulness of ‘scenario building’ with each social response unit is also being explored, in
order to compare concepts of the landscape/resources and perceptions of space between SRUs
[delimited principally on ethnic/degree of mobility grounds, but also within each ethnic group on
the basis of age set, etc.] using IDRISI. Scenario building is also being used to hopefully predict
the effects of different outcomes on each SRU for a range of possible WH systems in the form of
georeferenced Cost Benefit Analyses and Social Impact Assessments [see fig. 1].