Edited by: Shinya Konaka, Emery Roe, Greta Semplici, Rahma Hassan, and Sara de Wit

This Special Issue focuses on climate change and lived experiences of African pastoralists. Reports and arguments on climate change and its impact on pastoralists are many. How pastoralists are constructing and experiencing climate change has not yet been sufficiently clarified in light of evidence. For example, policy makers and scientists point out that climate change brings with it potential for more drought and conflict. However, according to field evidence from Kenya, livestock raids by way of example are rare during droughts. Pastoralists go to great lengths to avoid inter-ethnic clashes. The Special Issue provides new evidence and narratives about how pastoralists construct their worlds and thereby construct climate change issues. Implications for pastoral development are major.

Abstract

Scientific climate change narratives refer to stories that underwrite and stabilise the assumptions for policymaking concerning climate change, the latter of which are characterised by many unknowns and a variable consensus. As part of the current climate emergency, scientific and policy narratives cast pastoralists either as victims, vulnerable subjects to the impacts of climate change, or as contributors of adverse effects on human and environmental health largely because of livestock greenhouse gas emission). However, the impacts of pastoralists’ own narratives with respect to ‘climate change’ has not yet been represented in mainstream approaches and perspective to climate change, either theoretically or ethnographically (think here of changes in their perceptions and experiences of weather, rain, winds or surrounding environment (de Wit, 2020)). If pastoralists’ perspectives are unveiled, locally constructed realities and lived experiences of climate change by African pastoralists can emerge as well as interesting venues of comparison and contrast to official/expert opinions on climate change. This Special Issue aims to do so, employing a ‘relational approach’ (Konaka & Little, 2021), which accepts and accents locally constructed ontologies. The relational approach aims to describe a given reality of pastoralists not as a curious version of indigenous epistemology or local technical knowledges, but as the dynamic processes and relationships (see Konaka, 2022 for conflict displacement case and Semplici et al., 2024 for resilience case). While relational approaches are gaining recognition, these are far to be mainstream, and associated methodologies and implications are yet to be fully examined.

Such approach regards the ontology of local interlocutors as relationally constructed and does not presuppose essential entities. Regarding human-nature interconnectedness, many continue to presuppose the dichotomies or dualism of humans and nature. By contrast, the relational approach presupposes a non-essential perspective: humans are nature, and vice versa. This approach is particularly crucial in the Anthropocene, as it poses a definitive halt to the dichotomy between humans and nature. Therefore, the combination of both scopes—the critical scrutiny of climate narratives and the re-evaluation of relational ontologies of pastoralists—allows one to reconsider official/expert narratives on climate change and recast them in light of the realities constructed around climate by pastoralists horizontally.

Important
As a Gold open access journal, all submissions are subject to publishing fees. Fee solutions are available on a case-by-case basis, including a number of Institutional Agreements. There is also a fund available to support authors based out of sub-Saharan Africa. Please contact the editorial office if you have any questions.

Please see the following pages for:
Publishing Fees
Author Guidelines

Guest Editors

Shinya Konaka, University of Shizuoka
Emery Roe, University of California Berkeley
Greta Semplici, University of Molise
Rahma Hassan, University of Nairobi
Sara de Wit, Leiden University

References

De Wit, (2020) What does climate change mean to us, the Maasai. In Michael Brüggemann and Simone Rödder (eds), Global Warming in Local Discourses: How Communities around the World Make Sense of Climate Change. Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, pp. 161-208.
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0212

Semplici, Greta, L. Jamila Haider, Ryan Unks, Tahira S. Mohamed, Giulia Simula, Palden Tsering (Huadancairang), Natasha Maru, Linda Pappagallo & Masresha Taye (2024) Relational resiliences: reflections from pastoralism across the world, Ecosystems and People, 20 (1), 2396928
DOI: 10.1080/26395916.2024.2396928

Konaka, S. and P. D. Little. (2021) ‘Introduction: rethinking resilience in the context of East African pastoralism’, Nomadic Peoples, 25 (2): 165–180
DOI: https://doi.org/10.3197/np.2021.250201

Konaka, S. (2022) Material culture of displacement: ontological reflections on East African pastoral internally displaced persons, Japanese Review of Cultural Anthropology 23 (2): 47-78.

Article types and fees

This Special Issue accepts the following article types, unless otherwise specified in the Special Issue description:

• Brief Research Report
• Commentary
• Editorial
• Original Research
• Perspective
• Review

Articles that are accepted for publication by our external editors following rigorous peer review incur a publishing fee charged to Authors, institutions, or funders.

Article types

This Special Issue accepts the following article types, unless otherwise specified in the Special Issue description:

• Brief Research Report
• Commentary
• Editorial
• Original Research
• Perspective
• Review

Keywords: Pastoralists, Relational Ontology, Anthropocene, Resilience, Sustainable Development