Camels and Climate Resilience: Adaptation in Northern Kenya

In the drylands of Africa, pastoralists have been facing new challenges, including those related to environmental shocks and stresses. In northern Kenya, under conditions of reduced rainfall and more frequent droughts, one response has been for pastoralists to focus increasingly on camel herding. Camels have started to be kept at higher altitudes and by people who rarely kept camels before. The development has been understood as a climate change adaptation strategy and as a means to improve climate resilience. Since 2003, development organizations have started to further the trend by distributing camels in the region. Up to now, little has been known about the nature of, reasons for, or ramifications of the increased reliance on camels. The paper addresses these questions and concludes that camels improve resilience in this dryland region, but only under certain climate change scenarios, and only for some groups.This study was funded by The Royal Geographical Society with Institute of British Geographers Thesiger-Oman Fellowship

Patterns and Drivers of Communal Conflict in Kenya

This chapter analyzes patterns of communal conflict – i.e., violent conflicts between non-state groups which are organized based on communal identities – in Kenya. The politicized nature of ethnicity in Kenya, and the fact that both elections and land tenure are closely associated with ethnic identity, are highlighted as key factors explaining the prevalence of violent communal conflict. After discussing the main patterns of conflict since 1989, the chapter goes on to identify four main drivers of conflict: electoral politics, cattle raiding, local resources, and boundaries and local authority. The specific dynamics at play in different conflicts vary, and empirical examples illustrate how the precise way that different conflict drivers interact is different from case to case. The chapter also discusses different strategies by state and non-state actors to address and resolve communal conflicts, and how devolution – the decentralization of significant power to the local level under the 2010 constitution – has affected communal conflicts. As the discussion of devolution illustrates, a major point is that while communal conflicts in general should be seen against the background of a state and a political culture where ethnicity is strongly politicized, the impact of national-level political dynamics on communal conflicts will vary from case to case

Climate and Security: Evidence, Emerging Risks and a New Agenda

ReviewJournal ArticleThis article is part of a Special Issue on “Climate and Security: Evidence, Emerging Risks, and a New Agenda” edited by François Gemenne, Neil Adger, Jon Barnett, and Geoff Dabelko.There are diverse linkages between climate change and security including risks of conflict, national security concerns, critical national infrastructure, geo-political rivalries and threats to human security. We review analysis of these domains from primary research and from policy prescriptive and advocacy sources. We conclude that much analysis over-emphasises deterministic mechanisms between climate change and security. Yet the climate-security nexus is more complex than it appears and requires attention from across the social sciences. We review the robustness of present social sciences analysis in assessing the causes and consequences of climate change on human security, and identify new areas of research. These new areas include the need to analyse the absence of conflict in the face of climate risks and the need to expand the range of issues accounted for in analysis of climate and security including the impacts of mitigation response on domains of security. We argue for the necessity of robust theories that explain causality and associations, and the need to include theories of asymmetric power relations in explaining security dimensions. We also highlight the dilemmas of how observations and historical analysis of climate and security dimensions may be limited as the climate changes in ways that present regions with unprecedented climate risks. © 2014 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht