Misperceptions of the drylands as barren and empty are leading to their mismanagement. An IIED mapping project aims to create a clearer picture of their value to pastoralists.
"It's all in the mind," George Harrison once said. When most government planners look at Kenya’s Isiolo County, they see barren, dusty land. But pastoralists who live there see something else entirely. How do we know? It’s on their map.
Ced Hesse, principal researcher in IIED’s climate change group, presented the project at the 7th International Conference on Community-Based Adaptation to Climate Change this week in Bangladesh. He explained that the land "suddenly came to life" in the minds of local government planners who saw the maps and had previously thought the land to be "vast and empty". This is because maps validated the detailed social and economic knowledge that pastoralists have of the lands they live on.
The maps also help communities to articulate their local knowledge in a language that more scientifically-minded government planners understood. "The maps act as a bridge where both sides understand spatial information – in different ways," said Hesse. "By capturing it, there is a progression of information that becomes increasingly intelligible to planners."
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Source: IIED, Suzanne Fisher 2013.