Pastoralist Societies in the Sahel

This chapter focuses on ways that pastoralists respond to ecological and climate variability through strategies of pastoral mobility and exploitation of micro-ecologies throughout the Sahel. The chapter reflects recent scholarly work that argues for recognition of the viability of mobile pastoral systems and their long-term value to national economies and rural community nutrition. West African pasturelands are as biodiverse as woodlands further south, and herders exercise strategic decision-making not accounted for among most government decision-makers before the mid-1990s. In addition to policy challenges, twenty-first-century Sahelian pastoralists are faced with constraints on pasture access, criminal activity, climate instability, and religious radicalism. This chapter argues that intra-regional issues of land use policy and tension between extensive pastoral production systems and projects of nation-building are at the center of current political instability in pastoral communities.