Adaptation,conflict and cooperation in pastoralist East Africa: a case study from South Turkana,Kenya

The control and management of resources is an implicit focus of many recent studies that trace the role of environmental factors in the onset and duration of conflict. According to the resources scarcity approach, as scarcities of natural resources worsen they become unmanageable leading to violent conflict between groups competing to use the same resource(s). However, the resources scarcity perspective is misleading by de-emphasising the socio-economic and political factors that are crucial to understanding contested uses and control of resources. This paper introduces the concept of adaptation as an entry point into debates surrounding the role of resources in conflict. The notion that resource uses are socially embedded and politically contingent underlines a key argument in the paper that adaptation is a contentious process and is tightly linked to resource struggles that are laden with material and symbolic importance. It is argued that social relations and political forces shape different vulnerabilities, enlarging options for some to adjust to environmental changes while potentially limiting options for others. A case study of conflict and cooperation among interacting groups of livestock herders in Turkana, Kenya lends contextual support to these views.