Resilience of pastoralist livelihoods in dry grazing systems under different preferences

The resilience literature has emphasized that in systems with alternative stable states, management must account not only for economic returns but also for the ability of desirable regimes to persist under disturbance. We contribute to this literature by analysing how pastoralists’ economic incentives affect the resilience of a bistable dryland grazing system. We incorporate pastoralist economic preferences into an existing dynamic eco-hydrological grazing model exhibiting bi-stability by coupling off-take decisions to a weighted utility function, describing value generated by animal sales and ongoing benefits like milk and wool. We find that higher livestock prices increase the system’s resilience to irreversible shocks if pastoralists maximize their utility. On the other hand, we find that higher prices do promote management strategies with less resilience to shocks that are reversible. This means that while damage to the ecosystem can be restored, economic livelihoods will come under stress doing so, because herd size and/or off-take levels have to be reduced during this process. In addition to these findings, we present a mapping of the trade-off between utility and resilience by plotting the efficient combinations on Pareto frontiers. Higher prices steepen these frontiers, making resilience increasingly costly in terms of forgone utility. This paper adds both to the literature about resilience in social-ecological systems in general and resilient management of rangelands prone to irreversible collapse specifically.