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Panel No
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P108
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Title
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Pastoral mobilities and ecological variability, responses to socio-political stressors, and contextual adaptabilities in South Asia
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Short Abstract
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Mobility and access to variable resources are two key factors that are critical for pastoral livelihoods. This panel, focusing on pastoralism, variability, and uncertainty in South Asia, invites papers focusing on exploring the social, political and ecological stressors to pastoral mobilities and access to resources. In doing so, we seek to compare and contrast contemporary stressors as well as the range of pastoralists’ adaptive practices of navigating the conjuncture of state, non-state, and ecological processes.
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Long Abstract
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Mobile pastoralism is a globally significant livelihood that specializes in making use of seasonal and spatial variability in rangeland resources. Pastoral systems are embedded in unique socio-ecological contexts, and are highly adapted to local social, political, and ecological variabilities and uncertainties. Mobility in pastoral systems itself is highly variable and dynamic across different contexts, relies on “execution of a set of social understandings” (Agarwal,1999), and is a key practice of gaining access to pastures and other resources. The loss of access to these critical pastures has been understood as one of the most prominent stressors on pastoral practices across South Asia and other regions. Changes of access to land and resources has been driven by sedentarization polices of states seeking legibility and control over land, developmental interventions driven by the ‘will to improve’; and both exclusionary ‘fortress conservation’ and alternative ‘community-based’ variants of conservation. Fragmentation of extensive pastoral landscapes, changing socio-political systems that pastoralists are embedded in, and changing climate regimes all are being responded to in turn through contextual adaptabilities. This panel invites case studies on pastoral systems of South Asia that focus on questions of pastoral mobilities and access through the analytical lenses of social-political and ecological variability and uncertainty, seeking to compare and contrast contextually-specific stressors and adaptive responses.
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