Risk Management in a Hazardous Environment (review)

Bollig examines risk in pastoral societies through a controlled comparison between two case studies: the Pokot of North Baringo in Kenya and the Himba of Kaokoland in north-west Namibia. The book is divided into four main sections, each based on an impressive combination of available data and thorough field observation. The first section sets out the various hazards threatening the societies and their herds: the growth or decline of both human and animal populations, the incidence of drought, ecological change, livestock disease, changes in entitlements and the impact of regional insecurity and violence. The second considers how the various hazards are locally perceived. Bollig argues that focusing only on ‘objective’ or externally determined levels of risk is insufficient since hazards may be evaluated differently by the pastoralists themselves. The third section deals with ‘crisis management’, how communities cope with actual or threatened disaster, while the fourth discusses the range of buffering mechanisms that act to minimize vulnerability overall by, for example, either concentrating or dispersing stock wealth and by creating and maintaining security networks that spread both the risk of loss and access to livestock and pasture resources, and enable households to recover.

Bollig argues that the comparative method makes it easier to consider a wide range of variables and to get at the underlying common factors. The choice of societies to be compared is thus important. This one works well enough: Pokot and Himba are sufficiently similar to make comparison possible but sufficiently different to make it illuminating. Both societies remained committed to subsistence pastoralism and neither has, as yet, been very deeply penetrated either by the state or by the wider market. Yet they occupy different positions along a continuum of resource management between concentration and dispersal. Pokot have a strong communitarian and ‘egalitarian’ ethos: differences in wealth are not very marked and livestock is continuously being redistributed through dense networks of reciprocity. Himba concentrate stock wealth in fewer hands. Networks are shaped by kinship and patronage, and resources are managed by clans rather than by the community as a whole. Difference between the two groups extends to the ways in which they interpret and seek to deal with misfortune. While Pokot make a clear connection between internal strife and external threat and stress the importance of community rituals in maintaining social harmony and cohesion as a defence against disaster, Himba tend to accept that natural hazards are largely unfathomable and must simply be endured with the support of patrons and lineage. Pokot see themselves as active agents, responsible for their own fate and able up to a point to predict and ward off misfortune. They raid and are raided by the ‘enemies’ that surround them, and their perception of the world is shaped by a recognition of its volatility. Himba, however, see themselves as peaceable people inhabiting a stable environment that is threatened only by the incursions of others and the unpredictability of nature.

One disadvantage of the comparison is that, despite their wide geographical and cultural distance, both societies share a common marginality. This tends to exclude consideration of other factors, such as the differential access to ‘national’ political or economic resources, to wider markets and to non-pastoral options that are now characteristic of more incorporated and stratified pastoral communities. However, the book is structured in such a way as to make it possible for readers familiar with other societies to include these factors and ask their own questions of them.

Pastoral specialists will probably find Bollig’s conclusions solidly based and well-argued rather than surprising, but some challenge more widely held assumptions about the fate of pastoralism. The discussion of the difficulties of resource protection should be required reading for environmental NGOs, and Bollig is surely right in downplaying wealth as a factor in itself. Poorer herders seem able to survive as well as the rich. Indeed, the fact that poorer households are not expelled from pastoralism may be an important cause of the population pressure and...