Editorial: resilience in protracted crises: navigating uncertainty in the drylands

Abstract

This special issue of Disasters brings together contributions from across Africa to explore causes and experiences of protracted crises, as well as effective responses to them. In doing so, it challenges some of the enduring assumptions that have shaped discussions of crises on the continent and the ways in which these suppositions continue to shape policy and practice today. Shedding light on pastoralist and smallholder farmer responses to complex, intersecting, and unpredictable negative phenomena, the contributions call for new ways of working with drylands livelihoods at a time of substantial geopolitical, environmental, economic, and technological change. Indeed, across Africa's drylands—which cover more than 60 per cent of the continent's land mass—it is clear that forces of seismic transition are in motion. In many African settings, the proliferation of digital technologies and a marked uptick in connectivity are restructuring relationships between citizens and governments. In dryland areas, many of which lay claim to long histories of political and economic marginalisation, these transformations are especially significant and far-reaching. New forms of connectivity are changing the way information is shared in real time and influencing how disasters are experienced and navigated. They are also emerging as arenas for new forms of information exchange and civic engagement, where communities are increasingly able to question, negotiate with, and hold local authorities to account. Alongside these digital transformations, shifts in the global order are reshaping both the scale and scope of aid. Many of the conventions and principles that govern humanitarian action are being eroded, and a new international politics of naked transactionalism is rising. In this global context of weakened international norms and humanitarian institutions, Alex de Waal (2025) recently warned in this journal that famine is, once again, on the rise. In places where governance is weak and histories of political and economic marginalisation continue to influence everyday life, the implications of this are particularly profound. As international support contracts and becomes more nakedly politicised, protracted crises such as those explored in the contributions to this special issue face twin risks. The first is that they are relegated to a growing list of ‘forgotten’ crises as aid priorities shift. The second is that they are subjected to a new wave of expedient, instrumentalist interventions, disengaged from structural conditions, that disregard, displace, or seek to ‘modernise’ drylands livelihoods in ways reminiscent of past ‘top-down’ efforts—as critiqued, for example, by Adams and Grove (1984) and Adams (1989). Whatever the outcomes of these ongoing shifts, they are likely to unfold in landscapes already fractured and reconfigured by large-scale ‘megaprojects’, which range in focus from major infrastructure and economic corridor developments to extensive irrigation (Müller-Mahn, Mkutu, and Kioko, 2021). This form of development, which is designed primarily with national gross domestic product and growth metrics in mind, is indifferent to pre-existing local livelihoods, values, ambitions, or forms of social cohesion. It takes for granted an old idea, tenacious since colonial times: that the drylands are barren, passive, empty, and unproductive. Such thinking also informs many current strategies for and investments in climate adaptation and resilience, implicitly reinforcing assumptions that vulnerability is inherent rather than structural and that positive change must always flow from the outside. Amidst this convergence of environmental, political, and economic pressures, it is more crucial than ever to resist the pull of crisis narratives that obscure history, agency, and the everyday practices of adaptation that define drylands life. Indeed, it is this very preoccupation with crisis, sustained by a varied repertoire of enduring visual and rhetorical tropes, that so often limits investment in and support for rural livelihoods as they are (cf. Moore, 2018). As Janet Roitman (2014) emphasises in Anti-Crisis, crisis is never merely an empirical set of conditions, it is also an epistemological frame that comes with a kind of moral ordering. Such framing often justifies particular forms of intervention and thinking while foreclosing others. In the drylands of Africa, perpetual crisis talk conjures a vision of the future as an externalised terrain of risk, looming like a sandstorm. It does this through an actuarial logic that transforms uncertainty into probability. By rendering the unpredictable calculable, and thus manageable, this shifts attention away from creative, social, and relational engagements with the world to technocratic modes of anticipation and control that privilege prediction (Derbyshire and Hassan, forthcoming). Thinking about the future in this way poses challenges for long-term development—how it is imagined, planned, and measured. Yet, it also has pragmatic implications for how we understand contemporary disasters and what we do in response to them. Such disasters, ranging from conflict and disease to drought-related livelihood loss, are all ill-conceived as phenomena that come to wreak havoc on their own terms, from the outside, for they always unfold through relationships, values, informal institutions, and knowledge systems that precede them. This special issue brings together articles and case studies that investigate some of the ways in which this takes place, and what we might learn from comprehending them. Its aim in doing so is not a cynical celebration of local resilience in the face of profound structural constraints, but instead to draw lessons for improved investment and support in the years to come. To put this another way, its contention is that the most meaningful and enduring improvements to wider systems of support and governance do not stem primarily from technological innovation or data aggregation. Rather, they emerge from a deeper appreciation of local disaster management strategies, a better understanding of the relationships, institutions, and networks that enable dryland communities to navigate diverse challenges, and a commitment to engaging with these on an equal footing, as legitimate foundations of sustainability and resilience. The point here is not to place an additional burden of responsibility on local populations, nor to essentialise practices and knowledge systems that are complex, fluid, and ever changing. Instead, it is to ‘take local context seriously’ (Levine and Pain, 2024), looking beyond universal and inflexible solutions. Local contexts never hold all the answers to problems that are, after all, shaped by diverse, intersecting socio-economic, political, and environmental issues across multiple scales. However, effective action and policy do always depend on an attentiveness to the complexity of everyday life rather than abstract, monolithic categories imposed from above. Of course, advocating for such an attentiveness is not novel. Indeed, the contributions to this special issue build on long trajectories of research and debate on this very subject (often in the pages of this journal). These debates span themes from vulnerability targeting in humanitarian assistance programmes to drought management in pastoral areas, and from the entanglement of livelihood, history, and conflict to the relationship between global commodity prices and food crises. Despite decades of prior research and deliberation, the current era of profound political, technological, and climatic transformation renders this advocacy more urgent than ever. One is left wondering why this is the case. Do longstanding narratives about development, progress, vulnerability, peasant farming, and pastoralism simply retain more sway over policy and practice than evidence generated by research? Or are these narratives being renewed and fuelled by new dimensions of global urgency? Much recent research on drylands livelihoods (both pastoralism and farming) has set about establishing counter-narratives that might gain traction and influence policy and practice. As part of this, pastoralism's unique relationship with uncertainty, and the ways in which herders successfully manage variability in their surrounding environments and economies, has been an especially generative theme (Scoones, 2023). Over recent years, studies from multiple contexts have demonstrated the diverse ways in which pastoralists and wider pastoral economies are productive by means of variability (not despite it) and the need for aid to do better at supporting this orientation, rather than seeking to buttress against uncertainty through the institution of new forms of (often fragile) stability or predictability (Krätli, 2015; Roe, 2020). These ideas have important and yet minimally explored implications for prediction-based approaches to risk management and disaster preparedness in the drylands. Similarly, recent research into dryland farming systems has critiqued the enduring assumptions that continue to underlie many development efforts, framing future prosperity not as an expansion of ‘modernised’, commercial production, but rather as the continued flourishing of smallholder farming and the socio-ecological relations that underlie it (Moore, 2018). Davies et al.'s (2024) investigation of irrigation intervention in Marakwet in western Kenya, for example, provides evidence of both the ingenuity of locally rooted farming systems and the limitations of externally imposed models. Their work shows how historically grounded, adaptive practices are more resilient than novel standardised approaches, and more appropriate for future investment and support. In a similar vein, Wiggins et al.'s (2023, p. 4) recent report on ‘farming after fighting’, which focuses on post-conflict recovery across six countries, emphasises how economic recovery was derived, in these instances, ‘as much as, if not more than, from crops grown very largely by smallholders as from the commercial and export crops typically grown on larger farms'. Together, these studies and others advance a counter-narrative in which prosperity emerges not solely from commercialisation, but from the social, economic, and ecological vitality of smallholder farming systems themselves (cf. Moore et al., 2023). The contributions in this special issue speak directly to these, now well-established, counter-narratives. Across their diverse settings, they advocate—implicitly or explicitly—for forms of investment and support that nurture the peace, resilience, and prosperity already present within pastoralist and smallholder farming systems, rather than seeking to engineer these outcomes through new schemes, institutional blueprints, or large-scale transformations. What unites these articles is a shared attentiveness to the complexity of the challenges they examine and to the multiple, context-specific pathways through which improvement might be realised. Collectively, they foreground approaches that build with, rather than over, the social and ecological intelligence that already underpins life in the drylands. To do this, many of the contributions address complex crises from the perspective of the relationships and networks that are deployed amidst them. Daniel Rogei's contribution, for example, examines the changing nature of conflict between pastoralist communities in northern Kenya, unravelling some of the different ways in which borders, technologies, politics, and identities have come to shape and be shaped by shifting patterns of violence, theft, and collaboration. His article advocates against a simplistic reading of conflicts that ultimately always emerge at the intersection of diverse factors, from the complex politics of extractive resources to the expansion of telecommunications infrastructure. Digital networks, in his case study, both facilitate rapid, collaborative responses to episodes of theft and violence, and underpin them, allowing informal armed groups to navigate complex terrains of risk and trade stolen livestock via far-reaching supply chains. Making sense of all of this requires a grounding of contemporary phenomena within longer-standing patterns and dynamics, and an understanding of how ongoing, locally-led processes of change find expression amidst new possibilities and constraints. Indeed, some of the key implications of Rogei's study emerge from its demonstration of the fundamental point that significant recent changes unravelling in conflict-affected dryland areas—whether political devolution, technological change, or the emergence of new economic opportunities—do not operate as external, self-propelling forces of transformation. Instead, they are negotiated for better or worse by means of existing networks and relationships. Attending to this relational nature of change is essential for identifying realistic pathways towards forms of ‘positive peace’ that build on, rather than bypass, local capacities and social worlds (cf. Galtung, 1969). In particular, the role of technology should not be cast in purely instrumental terms, either as a driver of escalation or as a solution. Rather, the effects of technology in conflict settings emerge through complex, often contradictory interactions with existing social relations, power dynamics, and livelihood systems. In a similar vein, Samuel F. Derbyshire et al. draw attention to worrying trends in early warning and drought management in the drylands, highlighting some of the dangers of an overly technologising and technocratic formulation of the aid modality ‘anticipatory action’. They argue that increasingly mechanistic approaches are working to dislocate decision making and design from the complex everyday system dynamics in which interventions unfold. Pastoralism, in its unique capacity for managing profound uncertainty, is often ill-assisted by rigid, prediction-based programmes that work to simplify complex, contingent processes, and indeed knowledges, into data points and dashboards. As uncertainty increases, what is needed is not more action triggers but more flexibility and adaptability in the systems set up to deliver support. This requires a new approach to working with local knowledge as an open constellation of skills, practices, and familiarities, shaped by longstanding socio-cultural norms, rather than seeking to ‘integrate’ it in the form of lists of techniques or ‘coping strategies’. Their work connects with research across wider geographies, which has underlined the enduringly complex nature of crises in fragile and conflict-affected areas and the futility of seeking to determine and then stick to one course of action (see, for example, Levine et al., 2023). In such settings it is not certainty or fixity that yields resilience but rather relationships, social capital, sharing, and trust. A similar point has been made by Roe, Huntsinger, and Labnow (1998) via the concept of ‘high reliability pastoralism’; an argument against a latent conceptual focus on stability and robustness in drylands development, emphasising how pastoralists manage to achieve reliability not through time-tried techniques, per se, but by operating in dynamic ways amidst unstable conditions. The services that make this possible—transport networks, informal loans, information translation, social assistance, and much more—are rendered by ‘high reliability professionals’ who improvise and collaborate to ensure that the system (that is, the pastoral system) as a whole continues to function amidst shocks and unpredictable ecological and economic dynamics. Such thinking brings vulnerability itself into sharper focus, as well as the challenges of targeting it effectively with formal assistance in a context of such dynamic collaboration and sharing. These challenges are taken up by Rahma Hassan et al. in their contribution to the special issue. Presenting new empirical material from northern Kenya and southern Ethiopia, they rekindle longstanding debates about vulnerability assessments, systems, relationality, and social assistance, that in the pastoral drylands a fundamental is both resources and are via yet always that underlie the of from livestock and to are thus into a of sharing, in to which it sense to of assistance with of or What is needed to Hassan et al. is new approaches to aid that with such pastoralist dynamics not as an but as legitimate for resilience in complex and unpredictable conditions. A this is the of with aid and a towards more standardised these approaches in practice they and metrics at the of what on the A similar away from approaches is by et al., in their of humanitarian and development interventions in northern drylands, to the of Hassan et al.'s evidence from research into the outcomes of these interventions, et al. the dangers of that resilience in pastoralist such range to and the of infrastructure also or particularly existing management are such interventions risk drought vulnerability and resilience. Together, these studies of intervention and humanitarian assistance in northern Kenya via new empirical how the drylands through a of and crisis continues to obscure the complex system dynamics that shape both vulnerability and resilience at the local This is a point that connects with made about the need for approaches to humanitarian practice. on the of for emphasises the problems that emerge from the to aid environments as and thus to crisis the drylands into of and yet crises do they always do so within complex adaptive systems. improvement does not come from interventions but from working with local complexity through and adaptive forms of decision making that with local are set by and in this recently the of systems thinking for understanding they famine is to shocks and in it forms amidst the complex, relationships that livelihood, and In targeting to famine often to themselves towards the processes that shape resilience over Many of the contributions to this special issue build on and into these complex trajectories through which both vulnerability and resilience are and the ways local to and these dynamics. these article shifts attention to the institutional and networks that shape disaster management in the of some of the ways in which and negotiate diverse and points that flourishing relationships on are not to within communities uncertainty in the drylands. In systems and relationships, and the and them, are what determine both and study the of these relational and institutional dynamics as for the improvement of disaster advocating for more and for more collaborative approaches that the of over A of for this kind of collaborative approach be in the local conventions by and in their article evidence from the of These which in the and draw on local knowledge and practices, have for and management in complex and into for new forms of collaboration. the key to be from their study is that relational approaches to by protracted and complex forms of be This is particularly so such approaches are by an attentiveness to the ways of and working with local landscapes that already rather than being towards of peace, in negative as the of conflict and not the or flourishing of local forms of and as we in on local practices, relationships, and values, and in these as for peace, and resilience, we must not to the structural and material that shape and Such are explored at by Wiggins et al. in their contribution to the special which food across and northern the by local such as and Wiggins et al. against food to in global They that the in their study areas have been with a diverse of negative with this requires action at multiple which is to the experienced in the most populations, while the complex, socio-economic, political, and ecological systems that shape their in investments in of trade and the for assistance programmes and their such programmes must ensure that they and existing locally-led what possibilities do these contributions in the context of shifting and aid we attention to the risk that emerges from these changing global dynamics of drylands or to new forms of intervention designed to instrumental Yet, it is also that the of and need for the development and humanitarian system to all, approaches that support the agency, and power of local networks, and communities likely as to those of international contribution and case study in this special issue of Disasters ideas for such The evidence and new and complex the current also for change. are many through which drylands policy and practice by an increasingly of evidence and The is these into and policy that this must be in local while targeting the points in wider systems where meaningful change be This article was made by support from the and in and by the and as well as support from the for by like to from multiple and for their time and their many over the six years, and all to the special issue for their and their not to this article as generated or the current