Pastoralism and action for sustainability: Participatory planning for the governance of extensive grazing in Turkey

Through engaging with national and international fora, the project will share new participatory development approaches to rangeland governance, which can potentially become central to climate change mitigation and adaptation strategies within Turkey and internationally.
Project status
Ongoing
Departments
International

Many cast livestock as the big villain of climate change but fail to differentiate between low-impact extensive and highly-polluting intensive systems. With half the world’s land surface made up of extensive rangelands, a major global challenge is to develop resilient livestock systems that reduce climate impacts. Conceptualising resilience as emerging through bottom-up, transformational change processes, the project will adopt a participatory action-research approach, co-constructing solutions for addressing climate adaptation and mitigation. In two pastoral settings in Turkey and through transdisciplinary interactions in arts-based workshops, participatory rangeland management and climate action plans will emerge, informed by social and ecological research and framed by vernacular understandings of resilience. In both sites, these plans, articulated in the form of artefacts created by pastoral communities, will be shared at a pastoralism-focused festival and later becoming foci for wider policy engagement around Turkey’s emerging climate-livestock policies and the UN International Year for Rangelands and Pastoralism.

Research Team: Professor Ian Scoones, Institute of Development Studies; Dr Mehmet Fatih Tatari, Bilkent University

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