Climate change responses among the Maasai Community in Kenya

© 2017, Springer Science+Business Media B.V. The impacts of climate change to the dryland areas of East Africa are especially strong, especially if it is considered that these areas have weak institutions and governance systems. Climate change has also affected many rural communities in a severe way, reducing crop yields and sometimes causing crop failure. In Kenya and Tanzania, where drylands cover over around 80 and 50% of their respective land areas, rural populations have been especially affected. Among them is the tribal group of the Maasai, legendary nomad warriors, who have been suffering from persistent droughts and the negative impacts on their cattle herds. This paper describes how climate change affects the Maasai communities in Kenya and the changes seen in their habits and diet, in order to adapt to a changing climate

Can Development Programs Shape Cooperation?

Empirical studies among small-scale societies show that participation in national development programs impact traditional norms of community cooperation. We explore the extent to which varying levels of village and individual involvement in development policies relate to voluntary cooperation within community settings. We used a field experiment conducted in seven villages (208 participants) from an indigenous society in Indonesia known for their strong traditional cooperative norms, the Punan Tubu. We framed the experiment in terms of an ongoing government house-building program. The results indicate that there were synergistic and antagonistic interactions between existing cooperative norms and government development policies. Participants’ cooperation in the experimental setting was low, probably because the Punan Tubu are used to cooperating and sharing both under demand and in a context in which uncooperative behavior is largely unpunished. Variation in experimental behavior was related to both village- and individual-level variables, with participants living in resettlement villages and participants living in a house constructed under the government program displaying more cooperative behavior. The cooperation evident in resettled villages may indicate that people in these villages are more comfortable interacting in anonymous settings and less committed to the demand-sharing norms still prevalent in the upstream villages. The more cooperative behavior among villagers who have previously received a house might indicate that they recognize that they are now better off than others and feel more obliged to cooperate. Policies aiming to capitalize on existing cooperative behavior to stimulate community collective action should consider the specific conditions under which cooperation occurs in real settings since traditional norms that regulate cooperative behavior might not translate well to cooperation in government-led programs

Shift in Herders' Territorialities from Regional to Local Scale: The Political Ecology of Pastoral Herding in Western Burkina Faso

International audienceIn Burkina Faso, livestock sedentarization programmes are still at the top of policy makers’ agendas and at the heart of their discourse, despite huge changes in land cover, land use and territorialities in rural areas. This paper contributes to the literature on the impact of livestock policies targeting the sedentarization of pastoralism in sub-Saharan Africa by specifically highlighting the territorial consequences of such policies. This paper suggests that policies directed at improving livestock governance in a context of climate change and changes in land cover and land tenure need to focus on securing pastoralists’ reticular territories, which are made up of corridors and numerous areas of pastureland, rather than on creating disconnected state ranches