Format/Structure

The panel will host several lightning presentations before opening for a panel discussion with all presenters and the audience.

Long Abstract

Built upon managing uncertainties and balancing risks in marginal environments, pastoralism has a long history of adapting to socio-environmental changes. Sustaining pastoralism into the future implies facilitating the critical elements that underpin it, notably herd mobility, mutual aid, collective governance, institutions and tenure systems. But climate change creates novel unprecedented risks. Pastoral livelihoods also face a context of polycrises as stagnating revenues, animal health, politico-economic instability and generational renewal concerns further call for innovative adaptation strategies. Yet, too often, climate change adaptation efforts have supported techno-managerial fixes that are ill-equipped to adequately consider the complex socio-ecological systems within which adaptation take place.

In this panel, we seek to interrogate the political ecologies of flexibility and rigidity that shape adaptation processes in pastoral systems. Flexibility is increasingly recognized as central to adaptation, but some level of rigidity has also enabled the continuation of pastoral lifeways over time. Similarly, introduced rigidity may restrict the room to maneuver–for instance with policies favoring standardization–but may be needed to be able to maintain valued practices into place.

We welcome contributions of rich empirical case studies that analyze how flexibility and rigidity–whether inherent to local strategies or externally introduced–interact to shape contested adaptation processes in pastoral systems:

- How the flexibility embedded within everyday pastoral practices has historically evolved, including at what scales, by whom and how such flexibility is enabled or constrained

- Where in the system and how rigidity emerges and the associated power relations, values and social aspirations that may limit adaptation possibilities

- What trade-offs and alternatives are made visible when considering the political ecologies of flexibility and rigidity

By exploring these cases, we aim to open a space for critical discussions and reflections on how interrogating the political ecologies of flexibility and rigidity makes visible both adaptation limits and possiblities.

This Panel has 4 pending paper proposals.
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