This section summarises priority areas to improve peace and security for pastoralists in borderlands, working in partnership with other communities and with local and international partners. XCEPT evidence shows how lack of meaningful agency in politics and governance is an overarching root cause of insecurity for pastoralists, and that increasing their political agency is key to better security.
Pastoralists have important ‘horizontal’ political networks and capabilities among other communities across borders and in borderlands. Pastoralist spokespeople and community institutions have an inherent interest, capacity and experience in working ‘horizontally’ across borders, and a long history of resilient and adaptive cooperation on which to build.
Pastoralist communities need to achieve greater ‘vertical’ political agency to participate meaningfully in policy discussions and decisions that affect their security and wellbeing. Pastoralists’ experience and capacity to exert influence upwards through administrative and political systems that are often highly uncoordinated and may cross jurisdictional boundaries is very limited, and they face structural barriers such as political exclusion, social prejudice and adverse policies. Pastoralist communities can bolster their political influence through working in concert.
Relations between pastoralists and their own elites in government and politics are crucial interactions for attention and support – at sub-national level, and with their political representatives operating in the national capitals. Pastoralists’ horizontal and vertical political agency needs to function in concert, to enable peaceful and functional borderland political settlements and economies. Engagement with local and international partners, donors and others can help achieve the critical mass of community voice and inclusion that is needed for sustained peace.
Sub-national governments and national security bodies should prioritise enhancing formal collaboration with community institutions to co-design and co-implement security, justice, and development policies and interventions. International donors and civil society should fund long-term programmes that support communities to represent themselves at scale, at multiple levels of government from local to bilateral to regional. With the support of the people and their informal institutions, states could minimise the need for militarised borderlands.
How pastoralists and other communities in borderlands are represented in policy and programme documents, executive orders, and media coverage needs to be more balanced and evidence-based. The citizenship, resourcefulness, productivity, and institutional capacity of pastoralists and borderland populations needs to be safeguarded. Messages and policies need to be aimed at promoting social cohesion, and ensure that they ‘do no harm’ in inciting politicised division.
Sustainable solutions to insecurity challenges depend on pastoralists and other communities and their institutions being able to work formally at technical and political levels. This is key to institutions being responsive to communities’ needs and priorities, and able to develop appropriate policies that can address real problems in ways that support viable and peaceful political settlements and economies in borderlands. Community knowledge and action could help deliver better and safer cross-border mobility, for example replacing failed military solutions with civilian policing, justice, and development.
Civil society and international actors are well-positioned to help pastoralists and other communities expand their analysis, organisation and representation. Support is needed locally as well as at national and regional levels. They could back communities in upholding rights in the face of powerful forces aimed at extracting wealth or exercising political interests in borderland areas.
Box 2: The Cross-Border Resource Sharing Agreement, Karamoja and Turkana borderlands – potential and limits for strengthening pastoralist community agency
Borderlands politics and policy are key to peace and security for herder and other communities. Politics and policy are devised and decided through formal and informal engagements and institutions of law, order, rights, investment and accountability. These are negotiated between different interests, countries, and levels of administration.
Pastoralists do not have easy access to or influence over political and policy deliberations. Collective lobbying by community members and leaders can help to increase communities’ agency in policymaking about local peace and security, but the limits of what this can achieve become apparent.
Herder communities engaged in various dialogues with Kenyan and Ugandan state and military authorities at different levels between February 2022 and February 2023. These built on XCEPT participatory, action research methodology, led by IDS and its local research partners. Discussions focused on borderland peace security policies aimed at disarming herders. From herders’ perspective, discussions had decidedly mixed results, but they represented important experience in defining their own security priorities, working collaboratively and engaging with state authorities.
In February 2023, attention shifted to negotiating a Cross-Border Resource Sharing Agreement in order to outline routes, maps and modalities of natural resource-sharing between Karamoja, Turkana and Pokot pastoralists moving across the Kenya-Uganda border. Participation in the initial meeting to set up the process did not include direct community representation, but pastoralists were encouraged and felt that a well-articulated and -managed agreement could do much to improve conditions on both sides of the border.
A civil society group was invited to provide technical information for the agreement. The group was led by a local NGO involved in the XCEPT research. It was given very little time to consult properly with communities, and few of its contributions made their way into the agreement itself. But it succeeded in persuading the drafters that the agreement should be discussed by communities before it was signed.
Negotiations
Communities were unhappy that their involvement in negotiations was limited to three separate community consultations, one for each major group – Karamojong, Turkana and Pokot. They argued that community members and leaders (women, elders and youth) should engage directly and concurrently with deliberations by the military, security and political elite.
Kenyan and Ugandan state security priorities dominated the negotiations, rather than focusing on enabling sharing resources between cross-border pastoral communities: for Uganda, to maintain progress in disarmament; and for Kenya, to control incursions on its borders and promote the mobility of Kenyan pastoralists into Karamoja. Discussions also looked at enabling exploitation of the mineral resource wealth of Karamoja and building up agriculture (Uganda), and exploiting energy wealth in Turkana (Kenya).
Pastoralist leaders understood the limitations of the process and looked for opportunities for influence. Some senior government participants seemed to understand and acknowledge pastoralists’ priorities, and the importance and modalities of mobility. But pastoralists were sceptical that their priorities would prevail more broadly, for example against the interests of President Museveni, an executive order from whom explicitly sought to see an end to pastoralism in the area. They were also wary of NGO advocacy for their cause, which risks displacing them from influencing negotiations directly.
Agreement
The absence of organised community representation in the negotiations was reflected in the lack of communities’ priorities in their outcomes. Issues of peace, security and mobility in a communique and the draft of an agreement that emerged from the negotiations were of relevance to communities. But community voices and institutions needed to be much more involved.
Many provisions of the draft agreement that emerged from negotiations have nothing to do with, or may undermine, sharing resources between pastoralist communities. Several draft provisions are based on a flawed understanding of transhumance, and some risk contravening international human rights norms and even national laws and policies.
The draft agreement ascribes cross-border mobility to an ‘involuntary’ consequence of climate change. Evidence from community research and satellite analysis shows an increase in the frequency and extent of mobility in response to changing rainfall patterns. But water has always been scarce and rainfall variable in this cross-border area, and so seasonal mobility has always been an aspect of pastoralism there. Climate change is not causing pastoralist mobility, but it is causing it to change.
The draft agreement allows state parties to provide for ‘urgent’ and ‘transitional’ arrangements for free, safe and orderly movement for 15 years. This presumes that after 15 years pastoralism will have transformed into commercial agriculture and there will no longer be any need for mobility. Pastoralists support transformation in their livelihoods and economy but want an approach that is grounded in rights and respect for their culture, indigenous knowledge and institutions – including mobility. Kenya’s policy differs from Uganda’s, and recognises pastoralism as a legitimate production and livelihood system.
The draft agreement refers to collective punishment for communities of perpetrators of cattle rustling. This draws on customary law, but only applies if communities are in control of the justice process. It is contrary to international human rights resolutions, and national constitutional and penal laws, and its practical application is doubtful.
The draft agreement provides for transhumance corridors to be overseen by joint civil administration and security forces. But transhumance corridors are ecosystems, not roads or paths, and hence not amenable to being overseen in this way.
The draft agreement provides for establishing and enforcing a movement plan for ‘maximum’ periods of departure and return of migrating pastoralists. But migration periods and patterns are dependent on weather patterns that are increasingly unpredictable due to climate change, and so pastoralist resource sharing agreements are necessarily open-ended.
The draft agreement refers to supporting commercial agriculture. Pastoralists are concerned that the interests of commercial agriculture are likely to cause them to lose livelihoods.
Pastoralist community agency
A year after they were scheduled, two of the three community consultations had yet to take place. The process may have been superseded by disarmament priorities and events, and the draft agreement is likely to take a long time to navigate relevant ministries at national and sub-national level of both Kenya and Uganda.
Pastoralist community leaders embraced participatory action research as a springboard for political organisation and engagement – for example in meetings with political, administrative and military leaders on both sides of the border. Community leaders were able to confidently present strong evidence and arguments about causes and effects of insecurity, including as a result of their exclusion from decision-making. In return, in some meetings state officials were able to talk frankly about problems of military overreach, administrative corruption, and failures of justice and policing, in creating fertile conditions for violence. But multiple barriers to more meaningful influence over the process were clear.