Reframing analysis of ecological dynamics in rangelands of Kenya

By Ryan Unks

A paper that I recently published in the journal Landscape Ecology lays out an approach for integration of social science concepts into analyses of vegetation change in rangelands of Kenya. I intended this paper to open up a reflexive dialogue between social scientists and ecologists working in rangelands.

By focusing on the different social, political, and economic factors that mediate access to land, landscape ecology could produce more nuanced understandings of ecological change. People practising pastoralism “live off” ecologically variable land. But they have also been affected by different constraints that limit the way they relate to land.

I argue that by being more attentive to different types of social and political power that have influenced conservation interventions, ecologists working in rangelands in Kenya would also produce better science.

Rangeland ecology has undergone a shift over the past decades in how it has come to centre variability, rather than stability, and, how it now acknowledges that processes like herbivory and fire are integral components of these ‘open’ ecosystems.

The implications of extensive pastoralism for vegetation across different rangeland landscapes depend heavily on the timing and spatial concentration of livestock use, local patterns of variability in rainfall, and heterogeneity in things like soils. Small-scale experiments on grazing, even over long periods, cannot be reliably extrapolated to the landscape scale in rangelands with high spatio-temporal variability in rainfall, and the influences of pastoral land uses are also usually not even across landscapes.

Because ecological analyses focused on wildlife conservation often overlook many dimensions of pastoralism, this paper makes a humble attempt to reframe questions of landscape change after considering the range of factors that have constrained pastoralist livelihoods in Kenya. It was heavily influenced by Nathan Sayre’s work in the United States southwest, particularly the importance of thinking carefully about politics, power, and scale in the design of ecological analyses.

The paper draws on previous work where I focused on how Maa-speaking people have adapted their livelihoods in contexts of a range of interventions in land use in two locations in Kenya. I have previously written about this work in one recent blog post and an older one. In these studies, I focused on how informal and formal rules and norms mediated the way people access land and benefit from it and considered how changes in these rules and norms were creating new patterns of benefits and control of land.

Limiting pastoral mobility

I summarized these patterns across the two places I had worked. Colonial and post-colonial state authorities, local government authorities and representatives, and ‘non-state’ actors (e.g. settler colonial communities and wildlife conservation NGOs representatives) have all played a role in the creation of new formal and informal rules and norms that have imposed spatial controls (e.g. boundaries, changes in tenure, and other partitions such as conservancies).

Pastoral access to land has also been influenced by changes in social norms of labour and asset sharing, employment, and market relations, which are intertwined with political and economic changes that are closely linked to wildlife conservation.

I used this summary to design a new analysis that focused on how changes in pastoral mobility related to spatial patterns in rainfall and vegetation productivity. Using GIS and remote sensing, I analyzed changes in patterns of pastoral mobility in relation to the variability of rainfall and vegetation at broad scales, and asked how changes in access have restructured processes like herbivory and fire at finer scales.

GIS and remote-sensing approaches, of course, offer a highly partial perspective and are limited in their ability to incorporate the complexities of pastoral mobility, as Natasha Maru’s work brilliantly shows. However, using GIS at a broad scale that was appropriate for the specific questions I asked, the analysis distinguished important patterns in how pastoral access to land has been concentrated and how the land has been partitioned into different zones of use.

Comparing this new system of rules and norms to patterns of variability in rainfall and vegetation productivity, the study showed how the flexibility of pastoral mobility has been limited in spatial and temporal dimensions of access to ecologically variable land.

A worrying trend is how land tenure, land access rights, and the concerns of pastoral mobility have been secondary to concerns about wildlife connectivity and how pastoral access has tended to be limited from areas of highest rainfall and productivity. Taken together, these factors have produced new types of spatially partitioned land use that have concentrated pastoral practice in certain places and altered ecological dynamics in ways that are commonly overlooked by ecologists in Kenya.

Studies that claim to show that pastoralism is responsible for land degradation and impacts on wildlife populations in Kenya often do not include methods that appropriately account for spatio-temporal variability in rainfall and primary productivity, how changes in access to land have fragmented pastoral access or the changing scale of pastoral livelihood practices.

Landscape ecologists should be cautious of common explanations of vegetation change that focus on population, stocking rates, and land management without also considering these other factors.

Understanding power and land

Landscape perspectives can provide important insights about pastoralism and rangeland ecology, but also can risk perpetuating historical injustices, especially when they overlook factors such as the multiple types of power that have been applied to constrain pastoral livelihoods and land relations.

Understanding access and ecological processes as intertwined with power relations at different scales would enable landscape ecologists to design their studies to be more relevant to pastoral livelihoods and more sensitive to power asymmetries. In particular, ecologists should recognize that, in generalizing about the impacts of pastoralism, they can do epistemic violence by overlooking how different interventions have constrained relations between pastoralists and land.

My approach in this paper was relatively simple, but I hope that it provides an example that could be built on with more advanced interdisciplinary studies that integrate a wider range of socio-cultural, political, and economic dynamics into landscape analyses. This could enable rangeland and landscape ecologists to become more reflexive about their own role as knowledge producers and their relationships within power asymmetries, and ultimately, to provide stronger contributions to sustainability science.