Drylands Facing Change

This edited volume examines the changes that arise from the entanglement of global interests and narratives with the local struggles that have always existed in the drylands of Africa, the Middle East, and Central Asia/Inner Asia. Changes in drylands are happening in an overwhelming manner. Climate change, growing political instability, and increasing enclosures of large expanses of often common land are some of the changes with far-reaching consequences for those who make their living in the drylands. At the same time, powerful narratives about the drylands as 'wastelands' and their 'backward' inhabitants continue to hold sway, legitimizing interventions for development, security, and conservation, informing re-emerging frontiers of investment (for agriculture, extraction, infrastructure), and shaping new dryland identities. The chapters in this volume discuss the politics of change triggered by forces as diverse as the global land and resource rush, the expansion of new Information and Communication Technologies, urbanization, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the spread of violent extremism. While recognizing that changes are co-produced by differently positioned actors from within and outside the drylands, this volume presents the dryland's point of view. It therefore takes the views, experiences, and agencies of dryland dwellers as the point of departure to not only understand the changes that are transforming their lives, livelihoods, and future aspirations, but also to highlight the unexpected spaces of contestation and innovation that have hitherto remained understudied. This edited volume will be of much interest to students, researchers, and scholars of natural resource management, land and resource grabbing, political ecology, sustainable development, and drylands in general. The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

Angela Kronenburg García is an F.R.S.-FNRS Postdoctoral Fellow at UCLouvain, Belgium, and a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Padua, Italy. Tobias Haller is a Professor at the Institute of Social Anthropology at the University of Bern, Switzerland. Han van Dijk is a Professor at the Sociology of Development and Change Group at Wageningen University, The Netherlands. Cyrus Samimi is a Professor of Climatology at the University of Bayreuth, Germany, where he also serves as Vice Dean of Digital Solutions in the Cluster of Excellence Africa Multiple. Jeroen Warner is a Senior Associate Professor of Crisis and Disaster Studies at Wageningen University, The Netherlands.

1. Drylands, frontiers, and the politics of change PART 1: CLIMATE, ENVIRONMENT, AND NARRATIVES 2. Climate variability and institutional flexibility: Resource governance at the intersection between ecological instability and mobility in drylands 3. Environmental crisis narratives in drylands PART 2: RESOURCES, INSTITUTIONS, AND POWER 4. Wetlands in drylands: Large-scale appropriations for agriculture, conservation and mining in Africa 5. Large-scale agricultural investments in drylands: Facing some blind spots in the grabbing debate 6. The 'open cut' in drylands: Challenges of artisanal mining and pastoralism encountering industrial mining, development, and resource grabbing 7. Mega-infrastructure projects in drylands: From enchantments to disenchantments 8. The new green grabbing frontier and participation: Conserving drylands with or without people PART 3: CONFLICT, CONNECTION, AND LIVELIHOODS 9. Religious movements in the drylands: Ethnicity, jihadism, and violent extremism 10. Making cities in drylands: Migration, livelihoods, and policy 11. Drylands connected: Mobile communication and changing power positions in (nomadic) pastoral societies PART 4: RESPONSES AND POTENTIALS 12. Pastoralists under COVID-19 lockdown: Collaborative research on impacts and responses in Kenyan and Mongolian drylands 13. Alternative perspectives: A bright side of natural resource governance in drylands