This section traces the historical emergence of dominant narratives that continue to frame pastoralists within Anthropocene governance, showing how older colonial assumptions are reproduced in contemporary environmental discourse. Through tropes of modernity, pastoralism in Africa (and elsewhere) has been prey to misjudgements and negative stereotypes but it also continues to be largely mischaracterised by foreign policymakers, scientists and experts in fields like development, climate change and biodiversity conservation (Igoe, 2002). Colonial scientific narratives have contributed to their stigmatisation by ‘misreading’ pastoralist landscapes and producing nature narratives of blame. Starting from the “Desertification myth” of the 1930s when British and French foresters already warned about the advancing desert (Davis, 2016), European colonial administrations conceptualised African rangelands through a lens of degradation, fragility, and decline. Especially as it has been applied to African drylands and pastoral societies, it is empirically weak, analytically misleading, and politically consequential (Behnke and Mortimore, 2016). In the “Cattle complex”, East African pastoralists were seen as irrational cattle keepers, maximizing herds at the expense of the environment (Herskovits, 1926).

Colonial ecological science relied heavily on equilibrium models, positing a fixed carrying capacity beyond which rangelands would collapse (Scoones, 1995; Scoones, 2009). This resulted in postcolonial narratives of overgrazing (Lamprey, 1983; Du Toit and Cumming, 1999; Geist and Lambin, 2004), to the “tragedy of the commons” (Hardin, 1968) especially around the droughts of the 1980s. Research shows that these negative misconceptions have led to political oppression and catastrophic interventions, including land dispossession (see. e.g., De Bruijn and van Dijk, 1999). Since conceptualisations of ecological dynamics could not capture the non-equilibrium nature of dryland ecosystems, this led to a paradigm shift in which variability, not stability, is the ecological norm (Scoones, 1995; Helldén and Tottrup, 2008), although this is not always translated into policies. Pastoral mobility, rather than degrading land, was shown to be a rational adaptation to environmental unpredictability (Turner and Schlecht, 2019), and grazing does not do irreversible damage to rangelands (Hiernaux et al., 2009). Although views of pastoralism’s ecological impact have become more positive (FAO, 2018; Houzer and Scoones, 2021; World Bank, 2016), evidence such as studies on the regreening of the Sahel continue to be ignored in policy formulation (Helldén and Tottrup, 2008; Davis, 2016). These (post-)colonial frames, which may be termed the “social construction of ignorance” when uncomfortable knowledge is strategically ignored (Rayner, 2012), continue to shape global policy landscapes, as we detail below.

Pastoralist lands and livelihoods are increasingly under threat worldwide. This is largely due to agricultural and industrial expansion, socio-ecological change, land grabs in the name of nature conservation or development, and nationalist, ethnic and religious ideologies, yet scholarly and policy literature increasingly frames the fate of the pastoralist through the single prism of the climate change crisis, through narratives of blame (FAO, 2006), vulnerability (IPCC et al., 2022) and resilience frameworks (FAO, 2018). We argue that the rise of climate determinism, in which climate is elevated as the single or most important variable determining human life (Hulme, 2011), to explain vulnerability or blame, obscures complex and structural drivers of vulnerability, inequality, and long histories of marginalisation (cf. Benjaminsen, 2024); it also overlooks lived experiences and vital local knowledge embedded in ontologies of pastoralists themselves (Houzer and Scoones, 2021).

One increasingly common rendition of climate reductionism is that climate change, or conditions of drought and climate turbulence, directly lead to conflict or civil war, migration (McGuirk and Nunn, 2025) and even famine (Asiamah et al., 2023). Yet, social scientists have long contested such views by showing that there is no such a thing as ‘natural’ disasters, as there are no disasters without people, but they always mark the interface between an extreme physical phenomenon and a vulnerable population (O’Keefe et al., 1976; de Waal, 2018; Boas et al., 2019). These dynamics are structurally ignored, including in the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change 6th assessment report (Otto and Raju, 2023).

Despite longstanding misconceptions of pastoralists as “irrational cattle keepers”, they have not contributed to the global human footprint that characterises the Anthropocene era, yet the effects of the Anthropocene are increasingly felt and are encroaching on pastoralists’ lands and livelihoods. Such realities are perpetuated by crisis narratives about biodiversity loss that justify afforestation or other forms of land use restriction resulting in continued loss of pastures and livestock corridors (Benjaminsen, 2024: 107; van Dijk and de Bruijn, 2022). New global agendas perpetuating old discourses of modernity, in the name of nature and biodiversity conservation, climate change mitigation (carbon colonialism) and adaptation (sedentarisation and agricultural expansion), developmentalist projects of modernity (hydropower, sugar plantations, tree planting projects), land appropriation and alienation for safari hunting and tourism, all leads to further marginalisation and the underdevelopment of pastoralists (Warner et al., 2022). Malthusian explanations of overpopulation of cattle, and climate deterministic framings of arid lands as hotspots of desertification, are now being revitalised within Anthropocene frameworks.

Within development and climate governance, African pastoralists are persistently framed through narratives of crisis, vulnerability and impending collapse. As Roe (1999) argued, Africa has long been rendered exceptional through doomsday narratives that depict livelihoods as perpetually on the brink of failure. In the Anthropocene, such crisis thinking has been revitalised through climate change discourse, particularly within adaptation policy frameworks.

Drawing on Bankoff’s (2001) analysis of vulnerability as Western discourse, climate adaptation narratives reproduce older tropes that portray large parts of Africa as inherently disaster-prone (Table 1). From early tropicality discourses to contemporary notions of an “adaptation deficit” (IPCC and Niang, 2014), crisis is constructed as a natural condition rather than as the outcome of historical and political processes. These framings lend legitimacy to external intervention, technocratic expertise and solutionism, while masking structural inequalities and power relations (de Wit, 2018b).

Critical scholarship has shown how adaptation often operates as a relabelling of existing development agendas (Klepp and Chavez-Rodriguez, 2018; de Wit, 2018b). By framing vulnerability as a technical problem to be solved through expert intervention, adaptation discourse depoliticises the root causes of inequality, echoing Ferguson’s (1990) critique of development as an anti-politics machine.

Crisis narratives perform important political and epistemic work by simplifying complex socio-ecological realities and privileging particular forms of knowledge over others (Roe, 1991; Krätli, 2013). Pastoralist ways of knowing and living with uncertainty are rendered invisible, even though non-equilibrium ecology has demonstrated that variability, not stability, is the norm in dryland environments (Scoones, 1995; Scoones, 2009). Crisis is a cultural discourse (Beck, 2009; Roitman, 2013; Massumi, 2015) that shapes both policy and scientific predictions overly focused on Africa’s vulnerability.

The rise of resilience frameworks illustrates this paradox. While resilience is often framed as empowering, it frequently reproduces colonial power relations by shifting responsibility for adaptation onto vulnerable populations without addressing structural drivers of marginalisation. In pastoral contexts, resilience discourse simultaneously acknowledges historical adaptability while positioning pastoralists as deficient subjects in need of modernisation (Campbell, 2022). The paradox is that frameworks designed to support adaptation may simultaneously reproduce the conditions of marginalisation they seek to address (Amponsah, 2025). Against these crisis framings, pastoralist lifeworlds reveal a different orientation to uncertainty. Variability is not an anomaly to be corrected but a condition to be navigated. As we show in later sections, pastoralists’ relational ontologies offer alternative understandings of climate and adaptation that challenge the technocratic logic of crisis-driven policy.

Beyond representations of vulnerability, climate governance also shapes whose knowledge becomes authoritative. Not all forms of knowledge are granted equal authority (Hulme, 2017: 37). Modern climate science has come to dominate public and policy understandings of climate through processes of quantification and modelling which resulted in the idea of climate becoming almost exclusively known in global terms (Edwards, 2001: 32-33). From the nineteenth century onward, statistical climatology enabled the construction of climate “normals” (Brückner in Hulme, 2017: 33), while late twentieth-century climate modelling produced a planetary view of climate that appears universal and placeless (Hulme, 2010). This globalisation of climate knowledge has profound epistemic consequences, as abstract climate models offer what Hulme (2017) describes as “a view from nowhere”, erasing geographical, cultural and experiential differences. In this process, local and indigenous ways of knowing climate are marginalised, despite their fine-grained relevance for lived adaptation.

For pastoralists, the notion of a stable climate normal (Hulme, 2020) is largely meaningless. Climate is known and enacted through embodied practices, long-term observation and relational engagement with landscapes, animals and spiritual forces. As Goldman et al. (2015) demonstrate, meteorological drought does not necessarily correspond to pastoralist experiences of drought, which are shaped by pasture conditions, mobility options and social relations rather than rainfall metrics alone.

Despite well-documented uncertainty in climate projections, particularly for African drylands, policy narratives continue to rely on simplified climate scenarios. In East Africa, rainfall projections remain contradictory, producing what has been termed the “Eastern African climate paradox”, where models predict increasing rainfall while local observations point to altered seasonality and shorter rainy periods of the long March April May (MAM) rains. However, seasonal maximum in daily rainfall remains consistent, and partial recovery of this shorter rainfall trend can be observed since the late 2000s (Wainwright et al., 2019). These findings are consistent with local observations of Maasai pastoralists. Many studies based on Regional Climate Models predict a significant increasing trend in future annual rainfall and temperature for the drylands in Northern Tanzania (Mwabumba et al., 2022). Yet such nuance rarely informs policy documents. These examples illustrate that uncertainty is not only ecological but also epistemic, raising questions about whose interpretations of climate become policy relevant.

In Ethiopia, this selective use of climate knowledge is particularly evident. While climate models project increasing rainfall for large parts of the country, the National Adaptation Programme of Action (NAPA) foregrounds drought and flood risk, framing vulnerability as primarily climatic rather than political. Structural factors such as land grabbing, hydropower projects or restrictions on pastoral mobility are largely absent, rendering vulnerability a naturalised condition. Since droughts will likely occur in agro-pastoral areas, the promotion of drought-resistant seeds to promote agriculture as outlined in the NAPA begs the question whether this is the most appropriate policy response, or is it rather a way to serve the interests of multinational seed companies like Monsanto who have a strong foothold in Ethiopia (and Tanzania alike) (see ABNE, 2015).

Similar dynamics can be observed elsewhere. In the Sahel, desertification narratives have persisted despite satellite evidence of regreening (Helldén and Tottrup, 2008; Davis, 2016). As Fairhead and Leach (1996) have shown, such misreadings of African landscapes are not merely errors but forms of “uncomfortable knowledge” that are strategically ignored because they challenge established power relations and policy agendas (Rayner, 2012). Uncertain or partial scientific evidence is mobilised to legitimise interventions that restrict mobility, promote sedentarisation or justify land appropriation. As Campbell (2022) shows, climate narratives are increasingly used by states and elites to advance long-standing development and governance agendas under the guise of adaptation.

Climate change discourse simultaneously invokes pastoralists’ resilience and denies their expertise, reinforcing hierarchical distinctions between scientific knowledge and lived experience. It is a question of power: whose knowledge counts, under what conditions, and with what consequences. Recognising pastoralist ways of knowing climate requires moving beyond technocratic models toward an understanding of climate as relational, enacted and embedded in specific ontologies.

Against abstract climate models and global metrics, pastoralist experiences reveal locally grounded forms of environmental knowledge. In this section we show how pastoralists come to know weather, climate and their environment and show that their ways of knowing the world (epistemologies) are intimately bound up with their ways of enacting climate (ontologies and socio-cultural practices), and have to be understood as vital adaptation skills. Instead of abstract climate models’ view from ‘nowhere’, pastoralists’ knowledge is ‘a view from somewhere by someone’ (Hulme, 2017).

In northern Tanzania, the Maasai argued that weather forecasts and seasonal climate forecasts produced by meteorologists were not very useful, due to the broad geographical scope and temporal variation in their climate. Their own forecasting skills, for instance, are based on detailed observations of cloud and weather patterns, wind direction, insect behaviour, flowers, birds, trees, soil moisture, and even star constellations etc. Such forecasts are more meaningful to the Maasai than abstract medium-range weather forecasts and were corroborated by national climate scientists and meteorologists. This example demonstrates that environmental expertise emerges through situated engagement rather than detached prediction.

Pastoralists are not passive victims in this policy landscape, but are actively countering such disempowering discourses through collective action and political representation. For example, among Maasai communities in northern Tanzania, critical counternarratives have emerged by grassroots organisations that frame and position themselves as “masters of adaptation”. Maasai representatives argue that policymakers fail to understand pastoralism as a highly adaptive livelihood system in the face of unpredictable climatic conditions (A).

This is in line with critical scholarship that has demonstrated how pastoralism is a livelihood system that should be understood in its full complexity, within which livelihood diversification (crop production and wage labour), mobility and large herd management are among key coping mechanisms for cattle to survive during severe droughts (Leslie and McCabe, 2013; Goldman and Riosmena, 2013; de Bruijn and van Dijk, 1995). To put it in the words of a Maasai pastoralist: “We are used to adaptation since we can remember; movement is our way of life”. Oral histories show that as long as they can remember, they have followed the rain and green pastures with their herds, which has always enabled them to adapt to the highly variable and unstable climates. Fulani in central Mali refer to variability in climate and how they adapted to it, also with the breeding of cattle, and for agro-pastoral groups to change and use a variability of millet seeds stored in their granaries as a fallback, when they move with their animals.

A telling example of relational ontology as a vital adaptation strategy is described by Goldman et al. (2015), who observed contradictory responses to drought as defined by science. In 2008/9 a severe drought hit much of Eastern Africa, and the Maasai were badly affected. The problem was not so much the rainfall quantity but its distribution over the season and the non-linear relation between rainfall patterns and pasture production. For the Maasai it was the worst drought in living memory and they reacted by moving with their cattle. In 2010/11 another drought hit the region. According to rainfall data this drought was the worst in the region in 60 years. Yet, for the Maasai and regional NGOs it was not a drought, because of the rainfall distribution by mobilising herding strategies and systems of reciprocity they were able to manage. As the authors have rightfully observed in the context of different responses to drought in Maasailand: conflicts over knowledge are usually about a lot more, about ontological differences (Goldman et al., 2015). Here, drought becomes not simply a meteorological event but a relational condition mediated through mobility and social institutions.

Despite climate variability, the long history of drought in East and Southern Africa and the Sahel reveals the resilience of pastoral livelihoods and customary institutions; these often re-emerge after periods of duress and climatic stress (exceptions exist of social tipping points, meaning that social institutions could no longer be sustained due to complex stressors, see Menestrey, this volume). Scholars have shown that in the face of globalisation and government reforms, local natural resources management strategies and pastoral livelihoods continue to endure and their institutions have often been strengthened rather than weakened (Salih, 2001).

Drawing insights from organisational management, Roe (2020) sees pastoralism as a “global critical infrastructure” and pastoralists as “reliability professionals.” Just like in the water and energy sector, in which infrastructures seek to provide participants with the stable and safe supply of vital services, notably in turbulent times, pastoralists can be similarly seen to use this “high reliability mandate.” They do so by expanding their management options and responding effectively to increasing variability (Roe, 2020: v).

Roe’s reconceptualisation of pastoralists as ‘reliability professionals’ offers a crucial counter narrative to dominant risk-based approaches (i.e., pastoralists’ behaviour depicted as highly risk-adverse). Our contribution makes a similar point, by showing that reliability is not only a matter of skilled practice, but is grounded in relational ontologies articulated through language, ritual, and cosmology. Where Roe reframes pastoralism as infrastructure through an organisational theory lens, we demonstrate how pastoralists themselves inhabit worlds in which uncertainty, climate, and wellbeing are constituted through relations rather than variables (i.e., rainfalls, pasture biomass, resilience indicators).

We first examine how Anthropocene governance increasingly relies on technical interventions designed to anticipate and control uncertain futures. One of the biggest paradoxes is that in the fields of development policy and humanitarianism we witness the proliferation of more technologies and discourses of control, prediction and anticipation in the name of climate change adaptation and mitigation or sustainable development (Klepp and Chavez-Rodriguez, 2018). These depoliticizing tendencies point to another fundamental paradox characteristic: that to fix the Anthropocene, we need more control and impact–further anchoring the Anthropos through solutionism–rather than less human relationality and connection with nature.

The Great Green Wall of Africa (GGW) is the most ambitious tree planting project on the continent, stretching some 8,000 km across the entire Sahel. This megaproject that was initiated by the African Union in 2007, and funded by an array of multilateral organisations, is in many ways iconic for the Anthropocene era. It is telling that the region’s traditional inhabitants, the pastoralists and their resource use have not been considered, and entirely excluded from decision making (Turner et al., 2021; Zhu et al., 2025), thereby reproducing colonial imaginaries of wastelands as if these landscapes were ‘empty’ or void of people, and even biodiversity (Davis, 2016). The quick-fix appeal and techno-managerial ambition of the project becomes clear in the case of Ethiopia, for example, where the government tried to make people plant 566 million trees in 1 day. Two decades after the inception of the GGW, and the “takeover” by developed nations through billions of euros and dollars of funding, the project showed disappointing results and is not meeting the expectations of the IPCC and other expert bodies (Allouche, 2024).

These outcomes reflect a long tradition of externally imposed development schemes that neglect local values and ways of being in the world (Salih et al., 2001; De Bruijn and van Dijk, 1999). Noting that the largest funders of the GGW are a mix of international development banks, The European Union, bilateral donors, UN agencies, private actors and philanthropists like Jeff Bezos, this environmental megaproject to combat desertification is a prime example of a global network of neoliberal governance (Duffy, 2006).

These policy spaces are neither entirely international, nor national but are hegemonic regimes comprising transnational geographies of power that have come to dominate environmental politics in developing countries. Such policy regimes may best be captured by the governance state, which is a new development of post-conditionality in North–South relations, where the boundaries of the nation state and multilateral organisations, including private companies, donors, NGOs, international financial institutions, and a strong relationship between environmental NGOs and the World Bank, have become entirely blurred (Harrison, 2004; Duffy, 2006). While the vocabulary of partnerships and participation may appear neutral, necessary and productive, as it is also part of the Sustainable Development Goals, we argue that such concepts can create the illusion that everyone has equal say, while knowledge hierarchies and power asymmetries are already established and become co-opted into the same process.

National Adaptation Programmes of Action (NAPAs) are presented as technical instruments designed to identify urgent climate adaptation needs in developing countries. NAPAs provide a particularly revealing entry point because they make visible how climate expertise is translated into policy. While their direct impact on the ground may be uneven, these documents show how climate expertise is constructed, how authority is assigned, and how pastoralist futures are imagined. Beyond their policy prescriptions, NAPAs function as sites where particular epistemologies are stabilised, others marginalised, and power relations naturalised.

Although framed as participatory and nationally owned, NAPAs are shaped by international funding mechanisms, technical guidelines and consultant-driven processes, primarily coordinated through UNDP and other multilateral organisations. They reflect what Massumi (2015) terms ontopower: a form of governance oriented toward anticipating and pre-empting future risks. Recent analyses of Ethiopian climate policy help clarify the epistemic logic underpinning NAPAs more broadly. Campbell (2022) identifies three recurring narratives through which pastoralism is framed in climate adaptation policy. First, pastoralists are portrayed as inherently vulnerable populations, with exposure to climate risk treated as an internal condition. Second, pastoralism itself is increasingly cast as maladaptive under climate change, with mobility and extensive land use reframed as environmentally unsustainable practices. Third, adaptation discourse mobilises a longer-standing narrative of transformation, in which pastoralism can only persist through sedentarisation, livelihood restructuring and expert-led modernisation. Together, these narratives depoliticise vulnerability while legitimising intervention and reinforcing hierarchies between external expertise and pastoralist knowledge.

These framings are clearly visible in Tanzania’s NAPA (Vice President’s Office, 2007), which embeds pastoralists within a generic “livestock sector” and presents mobility as a problem to be corrected. The document proposes land-use change, education of herders, zero grazing and herd reduction, while asserting that livestock numbers exceed the land’s carrying capacity. Such claims reproduce equilibrium-based ecological reasoning and revive the colonial trope of the “irrational cattle keeper”. Ethiopia’s NAPA similarly frames adaptation as a technological project aimed at transforming pastoral livelihoods through improved seeds, irrigation, insurance schemes and early warning systems (Ministry of Water Resources and National Meteorological Agency, 2007). While acknowledging that pastoralists have historically adapted to climate variability, pastoralism is rendered viable only insofar as it conforms to expert prescriptions, echoing Campbell’s “pastoralism as transformation” narrative.

In contrast, Mali’s NAPA (Government of Mali, 2011) adopts a more pastoral-friendly tone, recognising mobility, transhumance corridors and local resource governance as central to resilience. It proposes rangeland rehabilitation, water access, veterinary services and early warning systems, and acknowledges conflict risks associated with land-use change. The NAPA lacks operational mechanisms, and mobility is framed as a logistical challenge rather than as an adaptive system in its own right.

Across the three cases, a striking convergence emerges: pastoralist knowledge is acknowledged rhetorically but translated into externally defined interventions. All NAPAs foreground climate hazards, drought, desertification, resource scarcity, as primary determinants of pastoralist futures. Pastoralists are positioned as vulnerable populations in need of education, technological support and behavioural change. Their relational ontologies, institutions and historical adaptive strategies are acknowledged only superficially before being translated into technical interventions such as irrigation, improved breeds or sedentarisation schemes. This paradox is central: pastoralists are simultaneously recognised as historically resilient and problematised as fragile, risky and in need of transformation. In this way, NAPAs reproduce a technocratic and reductionist discourse that obscures political-economic inequalities, marginalises pastoralist expertise and reinforces knowledge hierarchies.

Moreover, these policy processes increasingly open space for private-sector involvement. In both Tanzania and Ethiopia, climate adaptation agendas align with corporate interests promoting drought-resistant seeds, insurance schemes and climate-smart agriculture, often without robust scientific evidence (ABNE, 2015). Such interventions risk deepening dependency, eroding autonomy and undermining local ecological knowledge. Climate change thus becomes a vehicle for reasserting older development agendas under a new moral imperative.

Taken together, the NAPAs illustrate how Anthropocene governance translates uncertainty into technocratic control. They privilege external expertise, naturalise crisis and depoliticise pastoralist marginalisation, while sidelining relational ontologies that have long enabled pastoralists to live with variability and unpredictability. Rather than recognising pastoralists as knowledge producers and adaptive experts, NAPAs render them objects of intervention, confirming the broader pastoralist policy paradoxes traced throughout this paper.

Another area where climate narratives have fused with neoliberal regimes of governance is the world of nature and biodiversity conservation and national parks. To understand why these nature policy narratives are so pervasive, we need to trace their colonial origins. The European encounter with Africa’s nature has historically emerged as a wild and unspoiled Eden; a “paradigm of otherness” in which Africa came to figure as a natural backdrop against a civilised Western world (Garland, 2008). Colonial stereotypes imposed ideas of “wilderness” on African landscapes, animals and people that resulted in the separation between Nature and Culture (Neumann, 1998). These colonial “pre-modern” narratives that invoke a sense of primitiveness - landscapes void of people, or Africa’s Eden - continue to be employed by post-colonial governments and international organisations today.

In this context, pastoralists are imagined both through romanticizing tropes as well as through the exoticisation for commodification (we all know the wandering or jumping Maasai in safari landscapes with their spears in tourist brochures) and negative ones (backwardness, causing climate change and hunting for lions etc.). These wilderness narratives have informed ideals of “fortress conservation” (Brockington, 2002) and continue to have devastating impacts on local pastoralist communities today, who are increasingly becoming “conservation refugees” in their own country. Since 1960, the amount of land under strict protection for conservation worldwide has doubled, which has resulted in Parks vs. People conflicts. These “conservation” groups fail to recognize that the native peoples are an essential part of the biodiversity in the very areas they seek to conserve (Dowie, 2009). It is likely that protected areas will only expand: all political agreements, economic considerations, and much-highlighted contemporary global challenges within the Anthropocene framework–like biodiversity loss and climate change–point in this direction (Bollig, 2022).

The Maasai are an iconic example of the simultaneous commodification and romanticisation of their culture. Hodgson explains these contradictory dimensions as follows: “Except for their photo opportunities, Maasai were generally out of sight and out of mind. Mocked by the elites as primitive, accused of cultural conservatism, and excluded from most state-sponsored development initiatives, Maasai became increasingly impoverished as their land, livestock, and possibilities for viable livelihoods continue to disappear” (Hodgson, 1999: 121). Notably in Tanzania, the semi-nomadic Maasai have experienced a long and violent history of land dispossession, evictions in name of conservation and marginalisation. Since 1992, the Maasai in Loliondo continue to face violent land evictions due to a neoliberal government and a lucrative safari business, which render pastoralism insignificant and frames the pastoralists once again as destroyers of the environment. This shows how environmental narratives can simultaneously depoliticise land dispossession and legitimise intervention. While these discourses portray pastoralists as encroaching on the parks, socio-ecological studies have demonstrated that wildlife and cattle actually live very well together (Homewood and Rodgers, 1991). However, such scientific evidence is also structurally ignored and can be considered a form of ‘uncomfortable knowledge’ that is ironically enough in tension with conservationists’ interests and is therefore excluded (Rayner, 2012).

The Maasai who live in Terrat village have long been exposed to fortress conservation efforts and violent land evictions. Terrat is located on the outskirts of Tarangire National Park (see Figure 1), which became a game reserve in 1957 and was later “upgraded” to become a national park in 1970. The gazettement of Tarangire as a national park remains a painful memory for people who were evicted (Igoe and Brockington, 1999; Igoe, 2002). The area that is now Tarangire was central to their system of transhumant pastoralism, since the most important and reliable dry-season water points in the entire ecosystem–the Tarangire river and Silalo swamp–are located inside the park. The co-habitation of wildlife with the Maasai cattle has proven to have substantial benefits for biodiversity and wildlife health. During dry seasons, the wildlife graze and calve in the Maasai areas, which not only depletes their grasses but also makes the area uninhabitable for cattle. When wildebeest give birth a substance is emitted that results in poisonous grasses, which are lethal to cattle or cause blindness. Due to the ever-encroaching national parks that have drastically reduced grazing and living areas for the Maasai, their transhumance pastoral mobility has been entirely disrupted, leaving them and their cattle without hardly any dry season water points or grasses.

Climate change discourses are a convenient scapegoat for government officials to blame nature, or depoliticise the vulnerable situation the Maasai find themselves in. As former President Kikwete stated when he addressed an international crowd during an environmental conference in Arusha about the impacts of climate change:

This was a remarkable case of the Antipolitics at work. To deflect attention away from land evictions that were going on during the conference, as the president had just signed a contract to lease large parts of Maasailand to Ortello Business Corporation, owned by the royal family of the United Arab Emirates. After building their own airstrip, they were free to hunt for wildlife. The government justified the evictions by arguing that the Maasai are responsible for the killings of wildlife and environmental destruction. Villagers were outraged and felt utterly helpless, and many community protests followed.

The Maasai’s most serious concerns are not about climate change, but they feel continuously threatened in their existence by ongoing violent land evictions in the name of nature conservation that severely impacts their mobility and renders livelihoods impossible. During conferences Maasai frequently stated that animals have more rights in Tanzania than pastoralists. It was striking to say the least, that the fiercest opposition to this new climate change discourse came from the grassroots; a paradoxical situation in which the greatest resistance to this new paradigm comes from the very people it seeks to aid (ibid.).

Fulani nomads in the Sahel are also confronted with slow encroachment on their pastureland and increasing problems to access pastures in dry season pasture areas such as the Inner Delta of the Niger because of corruption and agricultural expansion (Benjaminsen and Ba, 2009; 2019; 2021). Powerful livestock owners increasingly try to get exclusive control over large areas of rangelands (Schareika et al., 2021.). Projects meant to improve pasture management are captured by elites (De Bruijn and van Dijk, 1999). All over West Africa, there is increasing evidence of agricultural expansion through investment in agricultural modernisation projects such as the Office du Niger in the Inner Delta of the Niger, but it is not yet very well documented. This leads to displacement and further land occupation and the shrinking of space for pastoralists and the increase in conflict (Toulmin, 2020). There is an increasing push to create ranching and controlled grazing for example, in Nigeria (ICG, 2021), limiting the mobility of pastoralists and meant to control conflicts between farmers and pastoralists. Yet the research on the consequences of these tendencies is far from complete.

Eviction from pasture for wildlife conservation is less prominent in West Africa as there is little wildlife left. The situation of Binder-Lere National Park in Chad is a case where Fulani have been evicted from their lands. Binder is a Fulani chiefdom that was part of the 19th century Adamaoua empire. The king became the representative of colonial and post-colonial governments. Binder territory includes today’s Park. The chiefdom has good relations with transhumant Fulani nomads who transgress their territory. In February 2022 the Chadian Military transition government accepted Loi, no 003, PCM/2022, to establish the National Park Za-Soo, in the réserve de faune Binder-Lere (135,000 ha) that was established by the Chadian government in 1974 (decrèt no. 169 PR). The reserve did not forbid the activities of the population. In the National Park, however, all human activity is excluded from the park that is 81,500 ha. The park’s borders have become territorial control points that pastoralists are forbidden to transgress, controlled by the gendarmerie and military with the NGO responsible for the (tourist) exploitation of the park. As Figure 2 shows, pastoral transhumance routes are redirected around the park, where they have to negotiate new arrangements with the sedentary populations and often end up in violent conflicts. Similar to Maasailand, the main argument is that the cattle of the nomads would be competing with the wild animals for natural resources. The underlying argument relates to income from tourism and control of pastoral communities. Government officials and Fulani elites see the future of pastoralism as a rangeland economy (Bruls et al., 2024).

Also here, violence is legitimised by Anthropocene discourses of environmental destruction and the urgent need to control and protect nature from Africans. International NGOs do not represent Fulani nomads correctly, but rather pursue their own economic and political goals. One consequence is a further push of the nomads to the south where violent conflicts between pastoralists and farmers are increasing. This in turn, feeds into the argument that the climate armageddon is used to reframe conflicts related to pastoralism as a climate change issue (McGuirk and Nunn, 2025); an ironic case of climate determinism’s narrative full circle.

Having examined how pastoralists are represented within policy discourse, we now turn to pastoralists’ own ways of inhabiting and making sense of uncertain worlds. Living with uncertainty and unpredictability is at the heart of pastoralists’ livelihoods and worldviews, as is evident in their mobility patterns, culture, languages and institutions. Accordingly, worldviews, knowledge and technologies of adaptation are not set in stone but continually evolve (Ingold, 2000). Being a herder in a pastoral landscape is thus a form of movement in which pastoralists, animals and landscapes co-constitute one another. Rather than corresponding to an Anthropocene imaginary in which humans create, control and negatively impact the environment, pastoralism can be understood as a form of “being” grounded in the continuous fostering of relationality between humans, animals and the environment. To see this we need an ontology that appreciates non-linear processes of co-construction rather than cause-effect relations. We label this as a relational ontology: an ontology that focuses on processual mutual relations.

This relational orientation becomes clear, for example, in the ways in which the Maasai in northern Tanzania translate climate change in their own vernacular, consistently referring to Eng’ai, a term that simultaneously denotes rain, God and sky/heaven (see section Maasai Eng’ai and how climate change invokes a moral universe of love and respect). Climate, in this sense, is not an atmospheric reality detached from social life; rather, talks about climate change are always moral commentaries about society (Van Beek, 2000), referring to changes in respect, love and social relations.

Historical research shows that pastoralists have long adapted to extreme climatic conditions across diverse ecosystems, including deserts, mountains and polar regions. Long durée history reveals that the emergence and spread of pastoralism in Africa are intricately intertwined with major climatic fluctuations during the Holocene (Kuper and Kröpelin, 2006; Smith, 1992). Archaeological research further demonstrates that adaptations to arid and semi-arid environments have always been diverse, unstable and contingent (Bollig and Schnegg, 2013: 1; Galaty, 2013; Sadr, 2013). These insights suggest that pastoralist livelihoods have historically been shaped by uncertainty rather than stability.

A relational ontology approach shows that pastoralists do not conceptualise climate as an external force acting upon a passive environment. Climate emerges through interactions among humans, cattle, land, landscapes, atmospheres and moral orders. Uncertainty is therefore not a problem to be solved but a condition to be navigated, mediated through relations of care, mobility and reciprocity. The following cases show how relational ontologies are not abstract philosophical systems but practical ways of navigating ecological uncertainty.

Relational ontologies refer to pastoralist understandings and enactments of the world in which humans, animals, landscapes and spiritual forces are interconnected through relations of care, reciprocity and obligation. These relationships are not metaphorical but constitutive of emerging socio-ecological realities, shaping how people perceive, categorise, adapt and act within their environments. Linguistic practices are a key site where these ontologies become visible, as pastoralist lexicons, metaphors and semantic fields encode multispecies worlds in which people, cattle, landscapes and cosmological forces are mutually constituted. These linguistic practices are living technologies that adapt to change while sustaining relational worlds.

Insights from environmental semantics (Bromhead and Levisen, 2022; Burenhult and Levinson, 2008) underscore that vocabulary related to “environment” or “climate” is not universal but encodes culturally specific ontologies. Terms in pastoralist cultures such as eng’ai in Maasai, barjó and the cattle-appearance lexicon in Hamar, or the Fulfulde noun class that groups “cattle”, “sun”, “fire” and “light”, reveal relational worlds that resist translation into Eurocentric categories. These linguistic architectures encode specific ontologies of environment, personhood and multispecies life, revealing how language materialises the relationships through which pastoralists inhabit and make sense of their worlds.

Understanding these linguistic categories requires situating them within broader epistemologies and ontologies. Hamar speakers, for instance, do not use a category equivalent to English “nature”. When talking about nature and environment, they rely on a term that encompasses “fate”, “life” and “state of wellbeing” (Strecker, 1988; Strecker, 2016), indicating an environmental ontology in which the world is an active force sustaining reciprocal bonds. The Hamar way of talking about what might be glossed as “nature” thus reflects a relational understanding in which environment and social life are inseparable.

Harrison’s (2023) notion of environmental linguistics captures this dynamic well: languages do not merely describe environments but function as tools for living within them, embedding ecological knowledge and ecocentric worldviews into grammatical and semantic structures. From this perspective, pastoralist languages such as Hamar, Fulfulde or Maasai are world-making, as their semantic architectures instantiate relations of reciprocity, care, and observation that are themselves socio-ecological acts.

Among the Hamar, this relational structuring is embedded within linguistic practices in which people, cattle, colours and patterns are interconnected through relations structured through care, reciprocity and embodied attention to animals and land. Together, these relations organise how environment, nature and climate are perceived, valued, and navigated, embedding environmental knowledge within everyday practices of care, naming, and attention to animals.

Seen comparatively, Hamar, Maasai and Fulfulde linguistic practices articulate distinct yet comparable relational ontologies in which resilience emerges not from individuals but from ongoing co-creation with cattle, environment, ancestors and God. These linguistic worldviews challenge the reductionism of global climate policy and affirm the plurality of ontologies in the Anthropocene.