General Description of Coping and Adaptive Strategies in the Literature

Households and communities confronted with various shocks and circumstances respond in a number of ways. For the past four to five decades various coping and adaptive strategies have been documented in the literature, particularly in the context of drought and famine in Sub-Saharan Africa. This section presents how these strategies are categorized and defined by different authors.

Household and community strategies can be broadly categorized into two: coping strategies and adaptive responses. The former could be considered as short term survival strategies, while the latter are long-term strategies of adaptation. Coping essentially means “acting to survive within the prevailing rules” (Gore, 1992 cited in Davies, 1996). On the other hand,

“when adaptation occurs, the rule system (or the moral economy) itself changes” (Davies, 1996:55). It should be, however, noted that coping strategies and adaptive strategies could sometimes overlap (Barton et al., 2001 cited in Ahmed et al., 2002:31). Individual households and social groups employ various strategies depending on differential access to resources, and opportunities and constraints which emerge within different contexts. In relation to this Walker (1995:152) states that “not every famine-prone community will have access to all […]

strategies or be able to use them all, and not every household in a ‘famine’ area starts off from the same level of vulnerability”.

In the literature while some writers (Birks 1980, Watts 1983, Corbett 1988 cited in Davies, 1996; Dessalegn, 1991) found out a sequential uptake of coping strategies, others (Mortimore 1989, Riely 1991 cited in Davies, 1996; Yared, 1999) have challenged this simple sequential model arguing that the pre-crisis period circumstances of individuals or households (e.g.

differential access to resources, endowments) influence their options and strategies. Other social and cultural factors also affect options and strategies to be employed in particular

66 Mitigation refers to measures which can be taken to minimize the destructive and disruptive effects of hazards and thus lessen the magnitude of a disaster (Maskrey, 1989:39).

contexts. For instance with regard to coping strategies, Davies (1996:59) remarked, “The fact that one person’s coping strategy is another’s livelihood makes the identification and monitoring of repeated patterns of coping behaviour more or less impossible for representative groups”.

Differences in options and choices occur at individual, household, community and livelihood systems levels (Davies, 1996:50). A study in northern Nigeria revealed that adaptive behaviour to drought over a thirteen year period varies between households in the same villages (Mortimore, 1989 cited in Davies, 1996:50). With each cycle of drought and partial rehabilitation, the range of options will change, and the rate of take-up of particular strategies will vary (Davies, 1996).

Davies (1996:45, 55) also makes distinction between coping strategies and adapting strategies: the former “are the bundle of producer responses to declining food availability and entitlements in abnormal season or years”, the latter involve “permanent change in the mix of ways in which food is acquired irrespective of the year in question”. According to Davies

“coping is a characteristic of structurally secure livelihood systems, and vulnerable ones are characterized by adaptation. In other words secure livelihood systems bounce back and restrict the use of coping strategies to periods of shock, whereas in vulnerable systems, coping strategies move up the hierarchies of activities after each shock to become simply an intensification of normal behaviour (Davies, 1996). Davies further argues that making distinctions between coping and adapting strategies is not sufficient. Thus Davies (1996:58) remarked that (i) “the activity itself has not changed but only its motivation and frequency of use, (ii) at any given moment in a community, one person’s coping strategy may be another’s adaptive strategy, and (iii) the shift between coping and adaptation is occurring all the time”.

Other writers also distinguished between types of coping strategies. For instance Corbett, (1988 cited in Davies, 1996) distinguishes between “insurance strategies and coping strategies”. The former are those activities undertaken to reduce the likelihood of failure of primary production. The latter are employed once the principal sources of production has failed to meet expected levels and producers have literally to ‘cope’ until the next harvest.

Frankenberger and Goldstein (1990 cited in Davies, 1996:48) also distinguished between various types of risk management and patterns of coping. WFP (1989 cited in Davies, 1996:48) differentiated between accumulation and diversification (insurance) strategies. The former aims at increasing a household’s resource base, and the latter at promoting a variety of sources of income with different patterns of risk to avoid the exposure associated with a single income source.

Still further distinctions were made with regard coping strategies. In a study of famine in Darfur in 1985, De Waal (1989 cited in Davies, 1996:48) distinguished between ‘non-erosive’

and ‘erosive’ coping, i.e. between those strategies which use extra sources of income and do not erode the subsistence base of the household, and those which do, thereby compromising future livelihood security. Distinction is also made between “hungry season strategies used for the most part of the year and strategies to survive particularly bad years” (Davies, 1996:48).

In relation to disaster and hazards, having reviewed the literature on household coping strategies Blaikie et al. (2004:115-118) have identified six categories of coping strategies.

These are (i) preventive strategies, (ii) impact minimizing strategies, (iii) building up stores of food and saleable assets, (iv) diversifying production, (v) diversifying income sources and, (vi) development of social support networks.

Of all distinctions, as indicated above Davies (1996) makes an important distinction between coping strategies and adaptive strategies, and elabourates the role and use of monitoring them in different livelihood systems in relation vulnerability. Davies argues that while such sources of entitlement (e.g. production and exchange) have often been monitored by EWS, those sources of entitlements (e.g. claims as calls, coping and adaptation) and mediators of entitlement (e.g. livelihood system protection⁶⁷, moral economy⁶⁸, state⁶⁹) have been ignored or rarely incorporated in EWS. Davies further contends that “monitoring the sequential uptake of coping strategies as sensitive indicators of proximate vulnerability⁷⁰ has drawbacks”.

Davies’s argument is that “as livelihood systems become structurally vulnerable, many coping strategies are incorporated into the normal cycle of activities and thus become part of the process of adaptation” (Davies, 1996:38).

In the light of entitlement approach, Davies considers “entitlements derived from coping and adaptation as tertiary activities pursued by people to survive when their habitual primary and secondary activities can not guarantee a livelihood” (Davies, 1996:238). Therefore, Davies states that “production and exchange entitlements are the central planks of subsistence in any year and of accumulation in good year; coping strategies, in contrast are reserved for periods of unusual stress. Activities become adaptive strategies when they are used in every year to fill the food gap left once production and exchange entitlements have failed to meet minimum food requirements” (Davies, 1996:238).

Davies further states that “most strategies are derived from the same agro-ecological and socio-economic conditions as production and exchange entitlements”, and “coping strategies are not hermetically sealed from habitual activities and the entitlements to which they give rise, but rather, are extensions or adaptations of such activities” (Davies, 1996:240).

Accordingly Davies classifies coping/adaptive strategies by ‘entitlement base’, and distinguishes them as ‘insurance strategies’ to offset potential risk or/and ‘deficient-management strategy’ to meet expected requirements in a given year. These include production-based, common property resource-based, reciprocally-based, asset-based,

67 Some evidences from Darfur (De Waal, 1989) and Ethiopia (Turton, 1977) indicate that people will strive to preserve future livelihoods even during crises (e.g. by reducing current consumption in order not to sell productive assets, or by returning home from remunerative migration in order to cultivate (cited in Davies, 1996:39-40).

68 By citing Gore (1992) Davies notes that it is erroneous assumption that moral economy is an informal insurance system which provides a community safety net in times of crisis, whereas in fact such relationship can be both extractive and exploitative and can become more so in periods of acute stress (Davies, 1996:40).

69 With regard to indicators of state mediators of entitlement Davies argues that two critical aspects of state mediation need to be addressed in EWS, (i) indicators of whether the state facilitates or inhibits coping and adaptation and, (ii) whether it makes damaging and untimely claims on entitlements (Davies, 1996:42).

70 Proximate vulnerability: that which changes from one year to the next as opposed to more or less permanent state of structural vulnerability (Davies, 1996).

based, exchanged-based, migration-based, and consumption-based coping/adaptive strategies (Davies, 1996:240-41).

The above section deals with general conceptual distinctions within and between coping and adaptive strategies found in the literature. As stated earlier options and choice of the strategies vary from household to household and from one community to another in a particular context or situation. The subject of this study is pastoral community. The following sections discuss strategies which pastoralists have developed over decades to adapt to and cope with difficult circumstances in African context.