This report provides four policy recommendations for international policy makers and implementing organisations working in Burkina Faso and the Greater Sahel more widely. These suggestions are driven by the belief that pastoralism itself can be the first line of defence against violent extremism, but that in order to be successful there has to be a much great effort to ensure the social rights of pastoralists and Fulani populations. Pastoralist-related conflicts find their roots – according to pastoralists themselves – in unequal access to pastoral resources, government policies and biased local governance systems that have been supported by NGOs and private sector programming.
The key to future engagement is to ensure that a new, more inclusive and conflict-sensitive mindset underpins programming. The basis for such thinking is to recognise that all resource users should be part and parcel of programming and local governance to ensure the peaceful co-existence of competing resource users, and the need for the further development of the pastoralist economy as the basis for a more stable security situation.
Based on this core insight, this report proposes four policy recommendations:
1.
Improve the representation of pastoralists in local governance – particularly in Burkina Faso’s ongoing decentralization process;
2.
Ensure continued pastoral livelihoods through diversification, intensification and training in the face of market transformation;
3.
Develop a less technical and more integral approach towards agricultural development projects;
4.
Support (pastoral) conflict mediation agents to prevent the escalation of localized grievances and conflicts.
1.
Improve pastoralist representation in (local) governance.
There is a growing realization that pastoralism can be the first line of defence against violent extremism. However, for this to be effective, a substantial effort needs to be made to improve the representation of pastoralists in (local) governance.
Our research finds that pastoralists and Fulani communities are largely excluded from political decision-making processes and are under-represented at both the national and local level. A specific reason why better representation is needed is that pastoralism needs a degree of flexible resource management systems, communal land management and non-exclusive entitlement to water resources. It is only through direct contact between resource users that mutually acceptable accommodations can be constructed.
What this means is that there is a need to correct the structural inequality that forms an important driver of conflict escalation. Therefore, efforts to ensure an inclusive approach to development have to recognise that pastoralists are a particularly vulnerable group that requires specific attention. It is important to ensure that local representation involves actual resource users rather than urban (Fulani) elites – who do not necessarily represent the interest of the larger group of impoverished rural pastoralists. There are three specific ways in which this can be done:
1.
Hold the Burkinabe government accountable for implementing the laws that govern herding territories. First, this includes a revision of the 2009 Rural Land Tenure Law to better reconcile different populations’ interests. The law provides mechanisms for formalizing and securing rural land rights, which has resulted in uneven access to the means for obtaining formal land rights leading to instances of land speculation and acquisitions by local and national elites. Rural Land Tenure Charters were designed to counterbalance this effect. Intended to ensure the formal recognition and approval of local agreements as the basis for participatory local governance systems, reality shows that their implementation remains minimal and the process has been captured by interest groups and has not sufficiently led to the inclusion of pastoralists. Second, the farmer-centric and exclusive type of property regime set out in the 2009 law hampers the fair governance of pastoral areas. The 2002 Law Orienting Use and Access to Pastures which guarantees pastoralists the right to pastoral land and to maintain the mobility of livestock is more explicit in pointing out how pastoral resources are shared amongst different users, stressing access to all stakeholders in a certain territory. So far, any implementation of this law has failed, resulting in the increasing encroachment of uses like farming in such areas. Concretely, international policy-makers have to a) uphold the norms agreed upon in the 2009 law; b) provide support for capacity at the local level to ensure the implementation and enforcement of the pastoral law and to protect pastures and rangelands from agricultural expansion. This will empower mobile and transhumant pastoralists to manage natural resources sustainably in collaboration with farming communities;
2.
Moreover, the ongoing decentralization process has to be made more inclusive. The goal should be to ensure better inclusion of pastoralists to systematically include their concerns. Presently, the central government continues to maintain a high degree of authority over the internal governance of municipalities, such as the right to remove elected mayors from office. Consequently, a complex decision-making environment has emerged with continuous bargaining. Yet, customary authorities are often the first (and sometimes only) responders to disputes and can play key roles in mediating disputes and preventing escalation. What this means is that decentralization needs to better account for the participation of traditional and customary authorities in local management, including pastoralists and Fulani leaders. One specific way this can be done is to ensure that the local level municipal councils and CVDs are no longer dominated by farmers (in only one of the review municipalities were farmers and pastoralists equally represented at the CVD – satisfaction with resource management was highest in the area).
2.
Protect pastoral livelihoods through diversification, intensification and training
This report finds that challenges to pastoralist livelihoods are driven by a structural change to economic methods of production. Moreover, it shows that pastoralists have been able to find sustainable ways to adapt to these new economic realities. While the market is growing in size, pastoralists do not profit from this. The policy challenge is to develop new thinking as to how pastoral livelihoods can be sustained and combined with the new economic realities.
To this end, the first thing is to realize that agricultural programmes are part of the ‘problem’. Many policy interventions are targeted at the intensification of cattle production in an attempt to satisfy the demand for meat in urban areas. But the problem is that such policies have a technocratic approach as their basis (e.g. technical solutions to increase production) while insufficiently considering the political and economic consequences for the livelihood of small pastoralist communities. Therefore, interventions that focus on increased production alone are not the solution. We suggest four concrete initiatives to help pastoralists to adapt to changing economic realities
1.
Pastoralists need help to attain livelihood diversification. This can take the form of providing complementary and alternative livelihoods in their pastoral value chain, for example in processing, marketing, production, and the sale of fodder and other natural products;
2.
Support for pastoralists in changing their vulnerable position in the market. Support is first and foremost needed to strengthen the negotiation power of pastoralists by organising sellers to bring their animals to a fair buyer at the market. Promising initiatives are measures that improve the bargaining power of pastoralist communities such as the MODHEM initiative – that has provided access to reliable data on market prices, to help pastoralists decide on which market to go to. Other measures include establishing cooperatives of pastoralists to coordinate collective sales – including at terminal markets abroad to profit from regional market integration;
3.
Protecting mobility as a key resilience and adaptation mechanism. Policy-making has to take a longitudinal approach to conflict and structural economic changes. Mobility has proven to be an essential part of the pastoral production system; it has been effective in responding to an increasing demand for meat and livestock products as well as a means to adapt to climate variability. The problem is that a sedentary bias in livestock policies as well as decentralisation is undercutting mobility. For example, the Burkina Faso laws on pastoral mobility and transhumance have been undercut by sedentarization policies. The international agreement among West African countries that allows the free cross-border movement of livestock including seasonal cross-border transhumance (the 1998 SWAC-OECD/ ECOWAS agreement) is an exemplary model of a socio-politically appropriate policy on livestock mobility in sub-Saharan Africa. It provides a legal basis for all cross-border movements of pastoralists in the region and thus plays a critical role in securing pastoralist livelihoods and supplying the growing urban markets with animal products. National legislations on pastoralism should be streamlined so as not to contradict but facilitate the implementation of this protocol.
4.
Supporting pastoralists in partially or gradually intensifying pastoral livestock production. This means first and foremost that pastoralists have to accept a changing reality and be able to profit from commercialisation efforts. To this end, a number of technical, economic, political and legal issues, including but not limited to secure access to land, strong pastoralists’ organizations, access to inputs and services, management of forage intensification, and market security, must be addressed. Large-scale market training for pastoralists could help to promote these policies. Opportunities might exist in the feed sector, young pastoralists who have abandoned the practice of transhumance and have settled in peri-urban areas can be trained to mix fodder (grass and crop residue mixtures) to accommodate the feeding of animals in urban markets or in times of scarcity during the dry season. Currently there is no correlation between the price and quality of animal fodder, because the number of animals is rapidly increasing but there is not enough feed, so people buy what they can get.
3.
A less technical and more integral approach towards agricultural development projects
It is crucial to base interventions on a profound understanding of the way access to natural resources is negotiated between multiple users. However, one of the findings of this report is that investment in development and resilience initiatives for certain groups has overlooked more structural reasons for underlying existing tensions and has thus undercut the resilience of other resources users.
Both pastoral and agricultural policy-making have been functioning in separate spheres, whereby the effects of policies focusing on increasing pastoral productivity on a status quo in many communities where farmers and pastoralists share resources are often not considered, and policies that have focused on strengthening farming livelihoods have paid little attention to pastoral dynamics within the targeted landscapes. For example, an increase in local livestock ownership has changed the prevalent political economic settlement in certain areas as communities become caught between two stools: increasing cultivated land and increasing livestock.
A third recommendation is therefore that more integrated approaches are needed – even in the face of high levels of insecurity and violence. Rather than supporting either farmers or pastoralists, projects focusing on development and resilience should seek to focus on the idea of multiple resource users within targeted landscapes.
1.
A simple recommendation to improve the integration of programming between pastoral and agricultural policy-making is to mainstream pastoral livelihood effects into all agricultural programming. This involves exploring the potential first, second and third-order effects on the pastoral value chain;
2.
Mainstreaming governance angles in technical projects implemented by donors aimed at increasing yields. Interventions by international donors have largely occurred in isolation as well – often in cooperation with livestock departments – with a focus on technical aspects, improving access to essential services such as markets, veterinary services, etc. But the political context in which these programmes occur is crucial as the distribution of power at the local level provides various opportunities for local leaders and communities to alter good project designs to the detriment of pastoral communities. An integrated governance approach is therefore also needed. What this means that funders should propose funds that seek require collaboration across ministries (the Ministry of Agricultural and the Ministry for Animal Resources and Fisheries) and organizations, challenging the working in silos. For implementers, this means that conflict sensitivity analysis should be at the hard of programming on all agricultural and pastoralist funds and properly evaluate programming in (resource) border regions. Participation of pastoral representatives should part of M&E frameworks can take the form of number of pastoralists in steering committees of agricultural projects.
4.
Support to (pastoral) conflict mediation agents to prevent the escalation of localized conflicts
Traditional mediation arrangements were historically successful in resolving local conflicts in Burkina Faso. However, the weakening and politicization of local and regional leadership has hampered the ability to mediate in a conflict. Instead, the local leadership have become part of the problem as conflict resolution mechanisms have become biased. Real efforts should be made to enhance local trust and confidence in the institutions engaged in the process of conflict mediation.
Conflict mediation should include national and local authorities, as well as the parties to a conflict, and be supported by independent mediators. An impartial justice system should be in place that combats impunity for crimes, in particular against pastoralist communities, to stop the vicious cycle of revenge and reprisal killings when different groups turn to more violent means when they feel that justice has not been served. Four specific mechanism can be considered:
1.
Supporting existing procedures for resource conflict mediation and conciliation such as the Rural Land Tenure Charters (the 2009 law). This can take the form of mobilising support for community leaders and both traditional and religious authorities to help identify local solutions that have been successful and to scale them up and codify them. These agreements and local rules – made in a participatory manner – should be legally recognised so that addressing the courts or litigation become a last resort. Codifying local that have been successful and can be upscaled, and controlling their legality by national (civil) justice, will avoid any ambiguity and make addressing the court or litigations a last resort. In carried out well, such system of mutual checks and balances could confine corruption and the use of resource disputes as a power play by both chiefs and national authorities.
2.
Supporting and strengthening the capacity of local mediation and conflict resolution bodies such as village councils and customary authorities for the settlement of disputes. In this process, discussions between pastoral representatives and state and security officials that may include common mechanisms for conflict management and resolution should be supported. Some successful examples are training by the Center for Humanitarian Dialogue (HD), Promediation who engage in community mediation and insider mediation by the Clingendael Institute who at the request of herder and farmer leadership support community peace dialogues. The evidence base shows that leaders from both farmer and herder communities in these initiatives have become more supportive and more constructive in dialogues and mediation.
3.
Better regulate competition between traditional and formal norms and regulations. To this end, a mapping of legal texts and informal customary rules has to be conducted in order to identify where formal and informal systems clash and allow for forum shopping. From this a proposition has to be developed to limit overlapping and often conflicting governance systems. The ultimate goal has to be a more impartial justice system not only as a goal in the distant future but a conflict resolution mechanism itself: the vicious cycle of revenge and reprisal killings as communities feel that justice is not served, needs to stop. A systems – even temporary – must come into being that can squarely compete with the offer of VEOs and other armed groups.
4.
Support local media outlets escalating by eschewing exclusionary practices or language that cast conflicts explicitly in terms of religion and ethnicity, stigmatizing Fulani. Moreover, these radio programmes can also be instrumental in countering the spread of harmful terrorist narratives. Whether using, post-war reconciliation initiatives like ‘Talking Drums’ in Liberia could be inspiring initiatives to counter exclusion and support reconciliatory agents.
