Pastoral conflict on the greener grass? Exploring the climate-conflict nexus in the Karamoja Cluster

Abstract

The Karamoja Cluster, a cross-border region between Kenya, South Sudan, Uganda, and Ethiopia, where pastoralism has long been the main livelihood, was extraordinarily affected by severe droughts between 2018 and 2023. During this time, pastoral conflict in the region increased to unprecedented levels. Being highly dependent on the environment, pastoralists are expected to be especially vulnerable to climate change in the near future. In our work we use a mixed-methods approach combining informant interviews to highlight the importance of local policies in the debate on the climate-conflict nexus, along with an empirical analysis of the linkage between climate and conflict, evaluating the predictive potential of different environmental variables. We provide a recent assessment of the conflict dynamics in the Karamoja Cluster from 2018 to 2023, a time marked by the COVID-19 pandemic, a locust plague and a series of severe droughts. We found that policies aiming to address multiple crises during this time limited the mobility of transhumant pastoral communities, leaving them exposed to the devastating consequences of climate change. At a broader scale, our analysis shows that higher levels of vegetation were associated with lower conflict. However, conflicts were concentrated on the transition zones between areas of high and low resource availability. Conversely, within the Karamoja Cluster, pastoral conflict occurred primarily “on the greener grass”, with peaks observed during periods of environmental scarcity following phases of resource abundance. Finally, we found that vegetation data outperformed other variables, such as rainfall, in predicting pastoral conflict one month in advance.