Dryland pastoralist systems are typically based on collective use of extensive rangelands for livestock forage. A range of additional environmental resources contribute to pastoralist livelihoods and well-being, by facilitating or complementing the benefits garnered from livestock husbandry. To cope with environmental changes that diminish landscape-scale forage availability, pastoralists can adapt the ways they utilize multiple components of this complex, interconnected web of resources. In our study system, a Maa-speaking pastoralist community in Laikipia, Kenya, some households utilize small-scale enclosures next to homesteads and beekeeping to facilitate and complement their livestock-based livelihoods. We explored how these practices are interconnected, and how they have changed and adapted in relation to broader environmental, social, institutional, and cultural changes that are rapidly transforming pastoralist livelihoods. We used household surveys, individual interviews, focus groups, institutional analysis, and secondary data from recent studies of environmental change to understand these nuanced dimensions of adaptation to environmental change, and their implications at the household and community level.
Results/Conclusions
Small-scale enclosures provided a range of functions, including small privatized grazing reserves and protected areas to keep beehives. While enclosures have long been common accepted practice, their uses have recently diversified and their contribution to well-being has become proportionally more important, concomitant with broader declines in rangeland condition access across the landscape. Beekeeping, like livestock husbandry, is an important economic and cultural practice in the community that has become more difficult due to environmental and social changes. Hives were customarily kept in trees with nearby floral and water access, and tree use rights are privately held. Loss of riverine tree cover, decreasing grass and forb abundance, increasing ephemerality of watering points, and increasing risk of honey theft have generally reduced honey production and favored hive placement near homes and in the aforementioned enclosures, creating synergy between the two practices. Interestingly, enclosure sizes and engagement in beekeeping were not related to household livestock wealth. Furthermore, evolving norms surrounding these privatized forms of resource utilization were flexible, accommodating, and generally geared toward minimizing interhousehold conflict. Thus these pose avenues for environmental change adaptation that may be more equitably accessed than other measures such as paid external grazing and external employment.