This week’s briefing by Simon Counsell and Jutta Kill looks at the Northern Kenya Grasslands Carbon Project in Kenya. The briefing can be downloaded here:
What is absurd, some might use the word scandalous, is that this assumption of pastoralist degradation of the rangelands in east Africa, the Horn, and Sahel, has been fueling rangeland management projects and then conservation and more recently carbon offset projects, since the 1970s. I was the socioeconomic on the Central Rangelands Development Projwct in So Alia that ballooned from a $39million USAID/WorldBank/GYZ project in Tre early 1980s to $100million (1980s dollars). The assumption was Somalis were degrading the rangelands. The premise AFTER years of range ecologist data collection showed it was quite the opposite - the pastoralists’ movement with embedded inter-clan agreements was fundamental to rangeland productivity. The fact over 40 years on despite a robust academic literature proving th e assumption to be dubious at best or baseless at worst, is what is really disappointing. The dominant logic wins over data and analysis to the detriment of people and planet.
What is absurd, some might use the word scandalous, is that this assumption of pastoralist degradation of the rangelands in east Africa, the Horn, and Sahel, has been fueling rangeland management projects and then conservation and more recently carbon offset projects, since the 1970s. I was the socioeconomic on the Central Rangelands Development Projwct in So Alia that ballooned from a $39million USAID/WorldBank/GYZ project in Tre early 1980s to $100million (1980s dollars). The assumption was Somalis were degrading the rangelands. The premise AFTER years of range ecologist data collection showed it was quite the opposite - the pastoralists’ movement with embedded inter-clan agreements was fundamental to rangeland productivity. The fact over 40 years on despite a robust academic literature proving th e assumption to be dubious at best or baseless at worst, is what is really disappointing. The dominant logic wins over data and analysis to the detriment of people and planet.