Rethinking pastoralists’ development from their perspective of disasters-averted

By identifying the specific disasters and crises pastoralists successfully avert on the ground and in real time, we move beyond a reductive or otherwise partial view of their real-time activities. While the chronic challenges of inequality, marketisation, precarity, marginalisation, and the climate emergency are well-documented, they represent an incomplete and, as such, misleading picture. I argue that the implications of these avoided disasters are critical to local development yet remain largely overlooked in current pastoralist policy, management, and their critiques.