Resilience of Borana Pastoralists

The concept of resilience has recently gained prominence as a key issue in effective international development aid programming and project interventions in low-income countries worldwide. The issue of resilience has become a key component of global agreements, including the United Nations’ 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the Paris Agreement on Climate Change. In this chapter, before going into a detailed analysis of the resilience of pastoralists in the case study area, considerable space is devoted to the conceptualization of resilience, including a brief note on its application in the context of pastoralism and detailed discussions of the major methodological approaches recently proposed for its measurement. The empirical part of the chapter is then centrally devoted to a detailed assessment of the current state of resilience (and its apparent dynamics) of Borana pastoralists by using two alternative empirical methodologies of the RIMA approach, developed by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), and the moment-based methodology recently advanced by Cornell University scholars. The estimated empirical results from different models indicate that fragility may better reflect the current state of Borana pastoral livelihoods than strength, as a considerable proportion of respondents have experienced declines in their resilience capacity over time. After repeatedly being hit by recurrent natural and human-made shocks over the last five decades, the ability to bounce back is becoming increasingly scarce among the Borana pastoralists in Ethiopia.