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There has been much talk of a “humanitarian reset” following the drastic decline in aid funding over the last few years, but much less about what to do next.
However, the Kenya-based Centre for Research and Development in the Drylands (CRDD) has built a significant body of work over the past five years detailing how pastoralists respond to crises in northern Kenya and southern Ethiopia, and we can credibly point to a way forward in this area.
Rather than rebuilding the existing humanitarian and development architecture with less money, some radical new thinking is required. The solutions can be based on what already exists – the practices, relations, networks, and institutions that pastoralists always make use of to sustain their lives and respond to shocks and stresses.
We have seen how people respond, how aid systems work (or often don’t), and what happens in practice on the ground. That sustained research – across many communities over many years – is represented in four open-source articles we summarise below.
High-reliability professionals
The first article on “high reliability professionals”, published earlier this year, looks at what actually happens on the ground when disasters strike. Our research coincided with one of the biggest droughts of the last century, in 2021, when people across the drylands had to mobilise to respond – long before any aid arrived.
Who are the people involved? These are what we call reliability professionals, a term derived from work on critical infrastructures where people have to manage uncertainties continuously, scanning for future threats and responding in real-time to challenges as they unfold.
Connected in networks, making use of practical skills and knowledge and always improvising, innovating, and adapting, such professionals generate reliability, averting disasters and reducing the impact of shocks. In pastoral areas, these are normal people – unpaid, unrecognised, and rarely acknowledged in aid programmes.
These are astrologers and intestine readers who provide early warnings; shopkeepers who offer credit; motorbike riders who scout for grazing, water, and conflict; well managers who regulate the use of water for humans and animals; market traders who manage markets for milk and fodder; and many more.
The article examines how these reliability professionals operate and suggests a new approach to development that builds on their capacities.
Building resilience from below
The second article takes the argument further, asking how we should reconceive “resilience” in the pastoral drylands. Resilience is a development buzzword par excellence. Signboards litter the landscape announcing different projects and their claims to be building resilience.
But too often such projects simply impose a solution from outside, many aimed at moving people away from their core livelihood of pastoralism. So-called “alternative livelihood” projects – chicken production, vegetable gardens, craft making, and the rest – assume that the problem is pastoralism and it must be replaced.
Pastoralism is deemed as backward, unproductive, and in need of change. This draws on deep biases and poor understanding of pastoral systems. Yet pastoralism, when well supported, can be the most effective approach to responding to droughts and other crises.
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Project-based resilience can actually undermine pastoralism and the wider livelihood system, with catastrophic long-term consequences. Instead, we argue, we must build from what’s already happening. Pastoralists do not see a singular “crisis” that can be confronted in the classic humanitarian-development mode, but responses unfold over time in relation to changing – and always uncertain – conditions.
Existing local responses are definitely not perfect, and people remain poor and marginalised, but there are many ways that external agencies – whether government or NGOs – can support pastoralists to thrive in ways that build resilience “from below”.
Here again, the role of reliability professionals and their networks come to the fore, with the potential for supporting such activities through flexible funding, infrastructure support, and platforms for sharing experience and lesson learning. Very often it’s part of a collective response drawing on local trust-based relations, moral economies (guided by shared social norms rather than profit), and locally-embedded institutions.
Rethinking vulnerability
Our third article argues for a rethinking of the way external agencies conceive of “vulnerability”. Vulnerabilities to droughts and other disasters emerge from particular contexts, and responses emerge accordingly.
The standard approach to aid and humanitarian support is to define a set of potential beneficiaries according to assessments of individuals and households. The result is a registry of those who receive aid, very often as cash supplied through mobile payment systems.
But in pastoral areas – as in so many other places – vulnerabilities are not individual or household based, but more collective, networked, and relational approaches are central.
Our research across the border areas of northern Kenya and southern Ethiopia shows how people redistribute aid funds in ways that respond to local needs. Responses are frequently collective since forms of local redistribution, care, and support are based on social relationships and moral economies that are culturally rooted and locally supported.
The expensive and cumbersome targeting systems of external agencies respond to their own audit and accountability imperatives but are upended when they arrive in a pastoral settlement.
The article makes the case that a new approach – more suited to the socio-cultural settings of pastoral areas and local understandings of vulnerability – is required that helps support local moral economies and mutual aid mechanisms rather than ignoring them.
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Everyday humanitarianism
The final article in the series – Rethinking humanitarianism: reflections from northern Kenya – picks up on themes discussed in the other three and makes the case for a rethinking of humanitarian practice in dryland pastoral areas.
The article contrasts classical resilience and everyday humanitarianism, arguing that an appreciation of everyday humanitarianism is critical – especially with declining funds to support humanitarian responses.
Classical humanitarian responses – rooted in the core principles of independence, impartiality, and protection – will of course continue to be needed when crises are extreme and persistent with real threats to life.
The article takes issue more with what has become the standard approach over the past years – project-based resilience humanitarianism. The plethora of resilience projects discussed in our second article do not deliver as expected and absorb huge amounts of time and money.
The alternative, we argue, is to overturn the aid dependency relationships that projects foster and start with what already happens on the ground.
Building on our arguments for reliability professionals, resilience from below, and local understandings of vulnerability, we make the case for a new style of humanitarianism based on the principles of community, connection, collectivity, and care.
The 4Cs suggest a different starting point, working with existing networks, supporting reliability practices, and sustaining collective forms of moral economy and care. Again, this doesn’t mean that all is fine and people can just be left to get on with it. But external actors must take on a new role of flexible support and financing rather than imposition and control.
In April this year, when we shared our results at the CRDD and partners’ summer school for practitioners in Isiolo, Kenya, we expected scepticism – maybe hostility – from the assembled government officials, UN agency staff, and NGO representatives. Far from it. People agreed: “this is what is happening”, and acknowledged, “we are part of the problem”.
The subsequent Isiolo Communiqué stated that “the urgent task ahead is not to transform pastoralists, but to enhance the system to support them.” These four articles provide a road map for moving forward and putting into reality the much referenced “humanitarian reset”.
