From Conflict to Coping: Evidence from Southern Ethiopia on the Contributions of Peacebuilding to Drought Resilience among Pastoralist Groups

The efforts of the SIPED program to improve peace and security appear to have contributed to creating conditions that enable greater freedom of movement and access to important resources that pastoralist groups depend on to cope with and adapt to severe drought.

The prevalence of conflict related barriers to accessing productive resources was found to have significantly decreased over the past two years in communities where SIPED has operated, while remaining high in other areas that the program did not reach. Fewer territorial disputes have meant that pastoralist households’ can more easily migrate with their animals to utilize the grazing land and water resources of other communities that have been less depleted by the drought. In addition, women are less fearful than in the past of traveling to the markets they depend on to sell their livestock products to meet their families’ food needs.

The findings strongly indicate that the greater access to productive resources in SIPED target areas was program related, rather than being due to a more general trend of improvement in the area. From past studies, SIPED’s work to facilitate peace dialogues, develop peace accords and agreements governing the management of natural resources, and strengthen the capacities and linkages between customary and government institutions, stand out as having made important contributions to bringing about the more peaceful conditions.

Pastoralist groups in Somali-Oromyia areas of Ethiopia who have greater freedom of movement and access to natural resources are less likely to have to rely on distressful coping mechanisms in response to extreme drought and more likely to be able to employ adaptive capacities, compared to groups without such access.

This study confirmed the existence of strong links between pastoralist households’ freedom of movement (and by extension, their ability to access productive resources) and their use of coping mechanisms that indicate vulnerability to shocks. Among the different types of productive resources measured, access to pasture and water for animals proved to be the most closely linked with households’ apparent drought resilience. Pastoralist households that had faced conflict-related barriers to accessing pasture and water for their livestock were significantly more likely to have had to reduce their food consumption and prematurely slaughter their livestock during the recent drought than households who did not face such barriers. These findings support previous studies that have shown that the adaptive capacity of pastoralists relies on greatly on their mobility (Proud, 2008).

While target communities did resort to distressful coping strategies in response to the drought, they reported doing so at lower levels than during previous droughts of equal severity, and less frequently than non-target communities. Less reliance on distressful coping strategies, especially those that involve the depletion of productive assets, is believed to put households in a position to recover from drought quicker and more easily (HPG 2009; ACF et al, 2010). These findings lend validity to the following broad theory of change examined by the study: Pastoralists in areas that have seen increased peace and security are more likely to have opportunities to employ effective livelihoods coping strategies, thus reducing their vulnerability to and aiding their recovery from extreme droughts.