COVID-19 and pastoralism in a context of rupture and structural reforms in Benin: Learning from uncertainty management from below
Final Report Abstract
The research project aimed at drawing a nuanced picture of how and with what consequences the ‘global’ pandemic evolves at its edges and, in particular, how people living from pastoralism experienced in dealing with uncertainties perceive the outcomes of the pandemic. These questions should clarify the scope of the pandemic and the scope of pastoralists’ adaptability. More concretely, the project scrutinised how the pandemic was experienced, interpreted and managed by pastoralists, also from a gendered perspective, in different parts of Northern Benin. To approach these questions, the project used anthropological notions of uncertainty, it referred to livelihood studies, in combination with approaches from gender studies. A multi-method approach was used which comprised group talks, individual interviews and everyday conversations with members of pastoralist households including traders of different ages, gender and living situation (in sum 208 persons), with health agents/ medical personal, community and state agents working in the field of pastoralism, journalists and others. Further methods comprised participant observations, a quantitative study in pastoralists households, as well as document and literature analysis. The results show that at the ‘edges’ of a West African society, pandemic measures were widely experienced and perceived as having economic and social effects on pastoral livelihoods. Economically, different segments were affected in different ways. While all pastoral households were affected by rising prices for imported food, mobile cattle herders, traders (of cattle and of milk products) had also to deal with serious uncertainties caused by mobility restrictions. They responded to those uncertainties in different ways, i.e. by changing their modes of distribution of products, diversifying income activities, some by giving up trade as income generating activity. Some women producers of cheese responded by creating forms of independent self-organisation and resource-management, thus contributing to specific gendered dynamics within their households. These results confirm the capacities of people living from pastoralism to adapt to the new and rapid transformations caused by the pandemic. Nevertheless, our results also reveal that other transformations such as rapidly decreasing natural pastures, rising conflicts between pastoralists and agriculturalists and decreasing security issues for herders and their cattle are perceived as much greater and more far reaching threats, as they endanger pastoral livelihood in the region. A rather unexpected result was the role of state policies of sedentarization in these transformations of pastoral livelihoods. Such policies were strongly fostered during the pandemic. On the base of the results it is concluded that the pandemic caused by Covid-19 can reasonably called a global event, as its outcomes are clearly felt even at the edges of the world and of societies. The research helped to calibrate the scope and the multiple ways of how the pandemic impacted societies, not only economically. Besides, it is concluded that future research agendas in African Studies in and in research on transforming economies and livelihoods of the Global South should more focus on uncertainty and politics of uncertainty. In order to better understand current transformations of pastoral livelihoods in Northern Benin, further research on state policies with regard to the reorganisation of the pastoral sector is needed. Future research should again be organized as “convivial scholarship” (Nyamnjoh).
