Pastoralists Review

The Tibetan plateau constitutes the world's vastest high-altitude rangeland. It has featured a unique pastoralist culture where, based on yak and sheep production, on complex exchange systems with agricultural areas and the lowlands, and in the context of ever-changing political conditions, pastoralists developed livelihood systems that helped them adapt not only to the harsh environmental conditions, but also to the ever-changing political and economic trends. The 20th century, most prominently the plateau's ever closer integration into the Chinese state, has brought profound changes to pastoral Tibetans. It has opened the plateau to the influence of a wide array of policies directed at 'developing', modernizing, and recently urbanizing the Tibetan pastoral areas. It has also connected even the remotest community to the booming Chinese markets and - indirectly - the world market. Pastoral communities, thus, are being opened up to new economic opportunities, exposed to new risks and integrated into increasingly complex commodity chains. Local consequences of climate change, the demographic transition, new lifestyles and consumption patterns, and new forms of wealth/poverty and social polarization further complicate the picture. The present volume discusses the question of possible futures of Tibetan pastoralism. Taking a perspective informed by the 'Sustainable Livelihood' approach, it presents a selection of current perspectives on these recent transformations and on their specific impact on local pastoral livelihoods on the ground. Its fifteen chapters, written by Tibetan, Han Chinese and Western scholars from the social and environmental sciences, offer field-work based local case studies that illustrate the complex roles of the (Chinese) state, of (new) markets, and of rangeland resources in the making of both the present and the future of the plateau's pastoral livelihoods.

Pastoralism and Climate Change in East Africa provides systematic and robust empirical investigations on the impact of climate change on pastoral production systems, as well as participating in the ongoing debate over the efficacy of traditional pastoralism. This book is an initial product of the Project Building Knowledge to Support Climate Change Adaptation for Pastoralist Communities in East Africa implemented by the Centre for Climate Change Studies of the University of Dar es Salaam with support from the Open Society Initiative for Eastern Africa. Traditional pastoralism has proved to be a resilient and unique system of adaptations in a dynamic process of unpredictable climatic variability and continuous human interactions with the natural environment in dryland ecosystems. Pastoral adaptations and climate-induced innovative coping mechanisms have strategically been embedded in the indigenous social structures and resource management value systems. Pastoral livelihoods have, nevertheless, become increasingly vulnerable to climate change impacts as a result of prolonged marginalization and harmful external interventions. The negative effect of global climate change has been an added dimension to the already prevailing crisis in the pastoral livelihood system, which is substantially driven by non-climatic factors of internal and external pressures of change such as population growth, bad governance and shrinking rangelands lost to competing activities.