WHY SHOULD GOVERNMENTALITY MATTER

FOR THE STUDY OF PASTORAL

DEVELOPMENT?
John Morton

Abstract
This article explores some of the ways in which analyses based around
Foucault’s concept of ‘governmentality’ might cast light on the ways in
which pastoralists in Africa are and might be governed, given the
persistence of poor policy, poor governance and hostile attitudes towards
pastoralism by central and local government officials. Key concepts in the
Foucauldian approach are briefly outlined: power (productive, multiple
and bound up with knowledge), government (‘the conduct of conduct’)
and governmentality (modes of thinking about government in general but
also certain modes specific to the development of Western liberalism).
Five reasons for using the approach in the study of pastoral development
are identified: a commitment to specificity and contingency; an attention
to multiple actors; an attention to diverse ‘technologies of rule’; a focus
on the interconnections of power, knowledge and discourse; and a record
of studying marginalized groups. The argument is illustrated with
examples drawn mainly from East Africa. Possible objections to a
Foucauldian approach are discussed, and key questions for pastoralist
research using the governmentality approach are set out.
Keywords: pastoralism, development, governmentality, governance,
Foucault

Introduction

African pastoralists are some of the poorest and most vulnerable people on the
planet. It is increasingly realized that the most important constraints to poverty
reduction and livelihood improvement among pastoralists lie in the spheres of
policy and governance. Despite rapidly improving understandings of pastoralism
among researchers, NGOs and (to some extent) donors, African governments
appear to persist in inappropriate policy and inequitable governance. Various
approaches to understanding (and overcoming) this inertia have been adopted in
both academic and development literature, but there is a need for new
perspectives. This article discusses how a very particular approach, that of
‘governmentality’ (Foucault 1991a, Dean 1999), might assist in understanding the
specific ways in which pastoralism and pastoralists are governed.
There is now a body of work that fruitfully uses elements of the
governmentality approach in the context of development in the poorer countries

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 Why Should Governmentality Matter for the Study of Pastoral Development?

of the South, combined in various degrees with ethnographic methods of

research. Although the approach has been used hardly at all in the study of
pastoral development, I argue here that there are clear arguments for adopting it.
These can be summarized as: a commitment to specificity and contingency; an
attention to multiple actors and diverse ‘technologies of rule’; a focus on the roles
of knowledge and discourse; and a record of studying marginalized groups.
This article is explicitly exploratory in nature, asking whether and how a
governmentality approach can cast light on pastoral development. It does not
present a single body of research designed in the light of the governmentality
literature, but brings in, illustratively, a variety of material, chiefly on pastoralism
in East Africa, that shows the fruitfulness of the governmentality literature for
reinterpreting existing research or generating new analyses.
The article starts by setting out how understanding of pastoralism has evolved,
while serious problems of policy and governance persist. The second section
reviews briefly some of the literature on power, government and governmentality
by Michel Foucault and others who have adopted and developed his concepts. The
third section sets out specific reasons why such an approach might be useful in
the study of pastoral development, while the fourth section explores some
possible objections. Finally, the sorts of research question that such an approach
might stimulate are set out.

Pastoralism: Poverty, Vulnerability, Policy and Governance

Pastoralists can be broadly defined as people dependent, actually or traditionally,

on livestock as their most important source of livelihood, and usually in some
measure nomadic or mobile. Thanks to the work of many researchers (key
references include Sandford 1983, Moris 1986, Behnke et al. 1993, Behnke 1994,
and Scoones 1995) and much experience at grassroots level, pastoralism, with its
mobility and collective resource management, is now recognized, at least among
researchers, NGOs and donors, as being a fundamentally rational and sustainable
livelihood strategy. A corollary of this is that the poverty and vulnerability that
pastoralists face are problems with origins external to the pastoral system; this too
has been recognized, though in a less thoroughgoing way.1 Another way of putting
this is that experience has shown that, with the partial exception of the animal
health field, there are few or no ‘technical fixes’ in pastoralism: technical
interventions such as reseeding, exclosures, rotational grazing, improvements in
husbandry and breed improvement have largely turned out to be blind alleys.
There has therefore been a turn in the debate towards policy (see Hogg 1992,
Cullis 1992, de Haan et al. 1997, Pratt et al. 1997, LEAD 1999, Morton and
Meadows 2000, Mohammed Salih 2001, among many other sources).
The policy issues confronting pastoralism are now well-rehearsed. There are
issues of land tenure and collective resource management. Pastoralists’ grazing

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lands are being encroached on by other forms of land use, crop farming, ranching,
protected areas and mineral extraction, or being divided into individual or group
ranches, and there is a lack of legal frameworks for communities to manage their
own natural resources. All these have threatened the mobility and flexibility that
allow pastoralists to survive in variable and uncertain environments; ‘adequate
land rights represent the issue of major concern for pastoralists globally’ (Nori
2007: 44).
Pastoralists’ ability to market their livestock has been subject to market
failures and policy failures. There is a lack of necessary infrastructure, including
roads or trek routes of a public-good nature (Barton and Morton 2001), but also
restrictions on crossborder marketing even when it is time honoured and the most
efficient way of accessing end markets (McPeak et al. 2006), and inappropriate
restrictions on trade and transport of animals, domestically and internationally, in
the name of prevention of animal disease (Thomson et al. 2004, Aklilu 2006).
Pastoralists also suffer from the inadequate or inappropriate provision of services,
both basic human services like education (Krätli 2000, Krätli and Dyer 2009),
and animal services (Catley et al. 2004).
However, reforming policies is not enough, for two reasons. Firstly there is an
issue of whether the process of making or reforming policy should involve the
people who will be affected by them: ‘across the globe, concerns for poverty
reduction have brought to the fore calls for policy processes, which are more
inclusive, transparent and accountable’ (Gaventa 2004: 274). This is not to
dismiss the need for technical expertise in policy-making, or the argument that
national policies must balance the various regional and sectoral interests:2
farmers, commercial livestock producers and urban dwellers as well as
pastoralists. It is both a general argument about democracy or ‘participation’ and
a specific argument for the specific knowledge that (in this case) pastoralists can
provide about their own environments and livelihoods to be incorporated in
policy-making. The evidence on pastoralist representation (for example Lister
2004, Livingstone 2005a, Morton et al. 2007) shows to what a limited extent
these processes are happening for pastoralists. The evidence on pastoralists in
PRSP processes (Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers, see below) shows how
exceptional efforts needed to be made, by outside agencies, to ensure inclusion
(Abkula 2002, Livingstone 2005a, Turner 2005).
Secondly, policies need to be implemented, equitably and efficiently, and
minimizing unforeseen negative impacts. There is evidence from the pastoral
areas of Africa, that even appropriate policies are not implemented or poorly or
damagingly implemented. Arero (2005) has given one example, that of
educational provision in northern Kenya, of a sweeping failure to implement a
basically well-intentioned policy. Some failures are straightforward: in the late
1990s in Uganda $34 million (U.S.) was allocated to water points in pastoralist
areas, in what was generally felt to be a policy addressing pastoralist needs, but

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‘disappeared’ in what subsequently became known as the ‘Valley Dams Scandal’

(Livingstone 2005b).
These issues around how policy is made and how it is implemented are often
labelled as issues of governance. Governance can be conceived positively, as a
broader notion than government, involving interaction between the formal
institutions of government and civil society, incorporating a range of scales from
the global to the local, and spanning the distinctions between making policy,
implementing policy and the routine functions of government. Leach et al. (2007:
7) note that ‘for many, governance opens up a broader analytical and political
agenda that addresses the multiple political processes and relationships through
which state and nonstate actors do, and might, engage, allowing for critical
engagement with their effects on the poor and marginalised’. Some of the
‘governmentality’ literature (especially Rose 1999) draws dividing lines between
the ideas of governance and governmentality, but at this stage of the argument we
can use governance as a label for a problem from which pastoralists suffer.
However, despite the identification by researchers, donors and NGOs of policy
and governance as the major issues, developing-country governments have
proved remarkably resistant to adopting appropriate policies. There is very
limited progress on the key issues of rights to resources, marketing, services and
infrastructure outlined above. Worse, some governments still hold, at least on
paper, to inappropriate policies, such as the Ethiopian federal policy aim of
settling pastoralists as farmers along the rivers that flow through Ethiopia’s
lowlands (Mohammed Mussa 2004, citing various government documents) – a
policy made even more inappropriate by actual and projected flooding as rainfall
increases in the highlands. More generally, concepts such as ‘overgrazing’,
‘carrying capacity’ and ‘the tragedy of the commons’ continue to circulate, even
though research has shown these to be questionable or worse in an African
context (Behnke and Scoones 1993, Swift 1996, Anderson et al. 2009). Negative
views of pastoralists are expressed:
In the livestock sector we continue to have nomads. Running around this
country … moving with their animals, spreading disease, living in very
poor conditions (Mary Mugenyi, Ugandan Minister of State for Animal
Industries, cited in Turner 2005: 23–24).
People who don’t want change and modern life … they eventually have
to settle, no doubt about it (Ugandan Veterinary Association Symposium,
cited in Turner 2005: 23–24).
The nexus of poor policy and poor governance around pastoralism can be
conceptualized variously, and nonexclusively, through different approaches and
with different terminologies. Swift (1996) talks of the persistence among
governments of policy narratives based on out-of-date, oversimplified or
inappropriate research, with central concepts such as ‘desertification’. Other
approaches highlight the concepts of the marginality or marginalization of

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pastoralists within African states, and specifically their multiple – geographical,

environmental, economic and cultural – marginalization (Lesorogol 1998,
Markakis 2004), or pastoralists’ lack of representation or ‘voice’ (Lister 2004,
Brocklesby et al. 2010). Also present are ideas of a supposed intrinsic tension
between pastoralists’ mobility and governments’ greater ease of controlling
sedentary populations, and the desire by states for control over resources
(borders, revenue from trade, minerals, income from tourism) and willingness to
exclude pastoralists from them.
These approaches have all produced important insights and important
suggestions for improving governance. But new analytical tools and perspectives
can shed further light on the inertia of policy-making and governance around
pastoralism. They can do this by examining situations of pastoralism in detail and
identifying how the persistence of unfavourable narratives, marginality, lack of
voice and political-economic forces play out. This article surveys the literature
around the concept of ‘governmentality’, which stems from the writings of the
French philosopher Michel Foucault (particularly Foucault 1991a) and its further
development, especially in the work of a group of British and Australian writers
who have used the concept, particularly Nikolas Rose (1999) and Mitchell Dean
(1999,3 also Dean and Hindess 1998) – although Rose points out that these
writers do not form a ‘governmentality school’.

Key Concepts: Power, Government and Governmentality

The concept of governmentality in Foucault’s writing depends on his conception

of ‘government’, which in turn stems from his earlier rethinking of concepts of
power. These concepts are briefly outlined below: ‘governmentality’ is set out at
greater length, because the concept, in at least one of its readings, depends on a
particular reading of European political history. The aim is to set out what sort of
enquiry into pastoralist governance might be carried out under the banner of
governmentality.
Power for Foucault (1977, 1980a, 1982) is seen as ubiquitous, located in
everyday and unremarkable practices. It is intimately related to knowledge
(though neither determining nor determined by knowledge) and not merely
negative or repressive, but productive (of ‘reality … domains of objects and
rituals of truth’ – Foucault 1977: 194). Power is also linked with the constitution
of the subjects of power through the formation of new identities, as citizens,
consumers, the unemployed or whatever. The ubiquity and productive nature of
power is characterized in the metaphor of ‘capillary power’, which ‘permeates …
how [individuals] learn to live and work with other people’ (Foucault 1980b: 39).
The Foucauldian conception of power is paradoxically related to freedom. Power
is distinguished from violence or a physical relation of constraint, as a process of
guiding the conduct of others (Foucault 1982). ‘To govern means to act on the

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actions of subjects who retain the capacity to act otherwise’ (Murray Li 2007: 17).
Power in the Foucauldian sense needs to be observed in the specificities of its
functioning, the ‘technologies’ or ‘practices’ of power. Work on power should
therefore take the form of an analytics of how power functions in particular
situations, rather than an attempt at a general theory of power (Dreyfus and
Rabinow 1982, Rose 1999).
Foucault used, in a particular fashion, the term government as a more specific
alternative to power. In Dean’s version of this definition, government is
any more or less calculated and rational activity, undertaken by a
multiplicity of authorities and agencies, employing a variety of
techniques and forms of knowledge, that seeks to shape our conduct by
working through our desires, aspirations, interests and beliefs, for
definite but shifting ends and with a diverse set of relatively
unpredictable consequences, effects and outcomes (Dean 1999: 11).
We see here first of all the essential multiplicity of government, akin to that found
in the definition of ‘governance’ above. Dean’s definition continues: ‘Agencies of
government, in this sense, can be local, regional, national, international or global:
they can be philanthropic, for profit or public’. This multiplicity is made possible
by the definition’s emphasis on the shaping of conduct (Foucault 1982) or, in a
formulation that has become a touchstone for Foucauldians, ‘the conduct of
conduct’ (Gordon 1991: 2, Rose 1999: 3, Murray Li 2007: 5 and many other
references). The definition includes, besides government by multiple agencies,
the self-government or ‘practices of the self’ which can include the following of
diets or the search for therapy to solve family problems. But Dean in his book
(1999: 13) prioritizes practices of government in the narrower sense of ‘practices
concerned to conduct the conduct of others’ – by and large also an appropriate
procedure in applying these ideas to pastoralism and other development
problems.
‘Employing a variety of techniques’ highlights the contingency of forms of
government. These techniques have their own autonomy and emerge under their
own specific conditions (Rose 1999). Using these already existing techniques,
and using them in combination, is part of what is frequently referred to in this
literature as the art of government.
It is worth quoting Dean and Hindess (1998: 8) at length:
These assemblages comprise a whole host of mundane and humble
practices, techniques, and forms of practical knowledge which are often
overlooked in analyses that concentrate on either political institutions or
political thought. These might include: forms of practical know-how,
from managerial doctrines of ‘total quality management’ to recipe books
for ‘entrepreneurial government’; intellectual tools, such as the
flowchart, the map, and the architectural or engineering plan; calculative
technologies, from the budget and the statistical table to sophisticated
forms of the audit and cost-accounting; modes of evaluating human,

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natural and financial resources, in terms of such entities as risk, profit,

probability and danger; ways of knowing, training and regulating various
agents…
The linking of government (and more broadly power) with forms of knowledge is
beyond doubt an important marker of the governmentality approach, as of other
approaches linked with Foucault. Government makes use of forms of knowledge,
such as censuses, maps, statistics, monitoring and audits. But more fundamentally
forms of government are forms of knowledge. As Dean and Hindess (1998: 9)
assert: ‘Government exists in the medium of thought, of mentalities or
rationalities of government. It is shot through with the multiple and
heterogeneous ways of making the world thinkable and calculable’.
This linking of government with knowledge is at the heart of the ideas of
governmentality. The term can be used simply and generally: ‘Governmentality is
how we think about governing others and ourselves in a wide variety of contexts’
(Dean 1999: 209), with the proviso that, in a Durkheimian tradition of discussing
mentalities, ‘the thought involved in practices of government is collective and
relatively taken for granted, i.e. not usually open to questioning by its
practitioners’ (Dean 1999: 13). Dean and other Foucauldians tempt us in such
passages to adopt metaphors of depth, to phrase governmentality as the ‘deep
structures’ of government. Such formulations, despite theoretical arguments that
Foucault’s thought is differentiated from the hermeneutic tradition of looking for
deeper meanings (Dreyfus and Rabinow 1982: xvii–xix), will be attractive in
answering the sorts of questions set forth earlier: the government of pastoralists
may be unresponsive, unprogressive and characterized by inertia, because of
‘deep-lying’ regularities in the way government and pastoralism are conceived.
Governmentality is also used in a continuum of meanings between a simple
and general formulation such as Dean’s above and a more historically specific
meaning. Foucault himself (1991a: 102–103) distinguishes three meanings, all
specific to the history of the West from around the sixteenth century.4 Foucault
sees a shift in the eighteenth century away from the mentality of sovereignty, and
a predominant concern with rule over territory (Rose 1999),5 towards a
fundamental concern of states with governing (and therefore thinking about and
producing knowledge about) populations as aggregates, as distinct from families
and territories. The term biopolitics is used:
A form of politics, conducted largely since the eighteenth century,
concerned with the administration of the conditions of life of the
population. The concept of the population as a living entity composed of
vital processes is essential to bio-politics (Dean 1999: 209).
This shift led to a concern of states with ‘the family, with housing, living and
working conditions, with what we call “lifestyle”, with public health issues,
patterns of migration, levels of economic growth and the standards of living’
(Dean 1999: 99). It depended on new ways of thinking about and gathering

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knowledge about populations, such as censuses and statistics. This shift makes
possible not only the modern welfare state in developed countries, but the
concerns and strategies of both states and international aid donors in developing
countries.
In parallel with the concern with populations in general, there emerges a
concern with defining and governing ‘the economy’. Government is seen as
defining an economy as a ‘quasi-nature’ outside itself, self-constituting and with
its own rules, but which can up to a point be known to, and be regulated and
modified by, government: indeed that modification or regulation of economic
processes seen as separate from government becomes a, if not the, fundamental
task of government.
In the nineteenth century a notion of ‘society’, or ‘civil society,’ emerges,
conceived of as separate from both government and the economy, but linked to
them by the concern for the reproduction of labour, problems of poverty and
unrest and the necessity of administering the destitute cast out by the economy.
‘Government of the social’ is again to be effected by a government, seeing the
social as something outside itself, attempting to rule through limited and cautious
modification of the processes within ‘the social itself’ (Gordon 1991, Dean 1999,
Procacci 1991, 1993). Linked to this is the concept of ‘government at a distance’
which seeks to ‘create locales, entities and persons able to operate a regulated
autonomy’ (Rose and Miller 1992: 173).
With governmentality, in at least one reading, being so closely associated with
political developments in Western Europe, care is needed in extending the
concept to the countries and populations that Europe colonized, exercising
sovereignty in its rawest form, leaving deep marks on postcolonial government
(Mbembe 2001, Chabal 2009). Dean (1999) uses a concept of ‘authoritarian
governmentality’, which can be applied to the rule of European colonial powers
over non-European peoples, as well as strategies for dealing with defined
categories within European states, such as paupers. Dutton (2009: 306) writes
specifically of the paradoxical nature of colonial governmentality ‘that is, in
Foucaultian terms, part disciplinary and part sovereign’, where the concerns of
governmentality and biopower were tied to the binary of ‘Europe and its Other’.
What sorts of enquiries are associated with these concepts? As mentioned
before, Dean (1999) and Rose (1999) both use the term ‘analytics of
government’, to distinguish the approach from those that see practices of
government as instances of ideal political concepts, evidence of law-like
regularities or systemic contradictions. The analytics of government in this view
is concerned with the singularity, contingency and specificity of how ‘regimes of
practices come into being, are maintained and are transformed’ (Dean 1999 21).
The objective of such enquiry lies not in the building of theories or general
positions, but in removing ‘the “naturalness” and “taken-for-granted” character of
how things are done’ (Dean 1999: 38), or in Foucault’s words, ‘pointing out on
what kinds of assumptions, what kinds of familiar, unchallenged, unconsidered

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modes of thought the practices we accept rest’ (1988a: 154). This links strongly
to a view of such enquiry as progressive but not tied to any global project of
‘emancipation’, ‘empowerment’ or opposition to domination.
The approach as it has generally been practised has been text-centred, locating
crucial texts (these can be internal reports, technical guidelines or academic texts
as often as they are high-level statements of political ideology) and submitting
them to close reading. This is not just a question of method: it also highlights a
position which counterposes the analytics of government and sociologies of
governance or sociologies of rule (Rose 1999). Foucault himself (1991b: 81)
distinguishes his study of the discourses around prisons from the ‘witches’ brew’
of prisons’ actual functioning. Murray Li (2007), however, writing in the context
of a developing country, argues forcefully for combining the governmentality
approach with the richness of ethnography, and does so to striking effect in her
own work.6 These questions are discussed further below.

Why Use Governmentality in the Study of Pastoralism?

As discussed in the introduction, there is now a body of work that fruitfully uses
elements of the governmentality approach in the context of development in the
poorer countries of the South. Of particular interest are certain works at book
length (Ferguson 1994 on Lesotho, Agrawal 2005, and Corbridge et al. 2005 on
India, Murray Li 2007 on Indonesia), combining the approach in various degrees
with detailed ethnographic methods of research.7 As much of the value of these
studies lies precisely in their richness and ability to make a sense of contingency,
it is hard to identify specific ‘findings’ (which in any case would presuppose a
methodological realism at odds with a Foucauldian method). However, the
specific set of concepts, the commitment to examining the texts that define
development programmes and their subjects and ‘making strange’ the
assumptions of those texts, and the questioning, sceptical temper of the approach
are all paying dividends in the realm of development.
The governmentality approach has been used hardly at all8 in the study of
pastoral development. I am not arguing here that the approach should be applied
to pastoral development simply because it has not so far been applied, or that the
approach needs the extra validation of being tested on pastoral development. I am
arguing that there are good reasons, specific to pastoral development, for
attempting to use it. Some of those reasons, the stress on the specificity and
contingency of forms of government and the importance of multiple actors are by
no means unique to a governmentality approach, are shared with broader
approaches to describing governance and may appear banal. But in combination
with the concepts of technologies of rule and the interactions of discourse and
power, and with the focus on minorities both excluded and other-defined, they

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add to the arguments for looking at pastoral development problems in terms of

governmentality.

Specificity and Contingency

The situations of pastoralists are hugely different across Africa, still more so in
other parts of the developing world. These differences relate to ecology and
political economy, but also to the context of history and political culture. These
combine in contingent ways. Specificity and contingency operate both in terms
of programmes, knowledges and ideas, and in the way they are played out in the
world – the ‘witches’ brew’ of actual social processes and relations, distrusted by
the Foucauldians, but embraced by those who would combine the approach with
ethnography, such as Murray Li (2007).
For example, the interaction between pastoralists and the Ethiopian state
cannot be divorced from the deep-seated conception of ‘Ethiopia’ as centred on
its highlands, which have formed an island of ancient Christian culture
surrounded by hostile Muslims. At the same time, pastoralists are responsible for
a commodity – livestock – which is one of Ethiopia’s major exports, and are
found on its borders, which are both politically unstable and economically leaky.
In Uganda, the situation of pastoralism is complicated by the presence of two
major pastoral groups, the Karimojong and the Bahima, each very different in
ecology, history and traditional social organization. The Bahima in turn are found
in small areas where they are a majority and much larger areas where they are a
minority among sedentary cultivators. Overlaid on this are the facts that many
Ugandans confuse Bahima, who have many ties to and similarities with
neighbouring groups in Rwanda, with Rwandan pastoralists who also cross into
Uganda’s borders, including both groups under the pejorative term balaalo; that
Uganda’s president, Yoweri Museveni, is himself from the Bahima group; and that
rumours about the Bahima’s status as a privileged ‘president’s people’ and
Museveni’s own questionable citizenship continue to circulate.
The emphasis on specificity and contingency also relates to the importance
given to asking how power is functioning in specific situations. This fits with the
need in the study of pastoral development to move from general concepts like
‘marginality’ or ‘lack of voice’ to see from the inside how these are being played
out.

Multiple Actors
A governmentality approach, like many approaches to governance that look
beyond the state, encourages attention to multiple actors, including the governed
and their own contributions to governance. The government of pastoralists, in the
Foucauldian sense, is carried out by different organs of central government (in the
restricted sense), those charged with increasing the well-being and productivity of
the population, and those charged with maintaining internal and external security.
In addition, it may be carried out by officials of the local state, by elected

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representatives at various levels, by staff of development projects, by donors, by

experts in animal husbandry, animal health or range conservation, by traditional
leaders with varying degrees of recognition by the state, by NGOs and by
community-based organizations. In particular cases even more actors may be
involved in government: pastoralists in India, for example, are subject to state-
level unelected ‘Welfare Boards’ (Sharma 2005). Add to all these the fact that
pastoralists themselves are responsible for their own government: ‘conducting
their conduct’.

Diverse ‘Technologies of Rule’

The approach also allows us to think about diverse ‘technologies of rule’.
Pastoralists are governed not only by the laws of the country, the ways these are
enforced, and (in many African countries) the actions of the security forces, but
also by policies made at various levels, local regulations, property rights
constructed and recognized in various ways, and different ways in which
knowledge about them and their environment is defined, collected and fed back
to them.
To take some of these technologies: overarching national development
policies, in particular the Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs) required by
the World Bank and IMF of Highly Indebted Poor Countries, and strongly
encouraged of other aid-recipient governments, have become a significant way of
codifying development priorities and steering the allocation of national and donor
resources, and a significant benchmark against which development actions are
appraised and evaluated. Such policies are supposed to be formulated through
widespread ‘stakeholder participation’ and thus assert a peculiar legitimacy
stemming from the international financial institutions, from governments, and
directly from the people. They include technical detail on planned or sanctioned
development intervention that sets them apart from legislative instruments, and
base these on analyses of development problems, and more fundamentally still on
a tacit setting out and recognition of the possible categories of development action
and the possible categories of development beneficiary.
It is therefore important whether pastoralism, pastoral development and
pastoralists are included as permissible ways of knowing about development and
doing development, and permissible subjects of development. The tendency for
pastoralists and pastoral development to not be recognized in such documents has
therefore engendered a subsequent effort, particularly by local and international
NGOs, to speak for and about pastoralists in the process of formulating the
policies, and have them recognized in the final documents. In Kenya in 2000 a
coalition of international and national NGOs and donor-funded government
projects formed a Pastoralist Thematic Group, organized consultations with
pastoralists and made draft consultations to the PRSP (Abkula 2002, Livingstone
2005a).9 As a result:

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Issues such as infrastructure development, livestock marketing, conflict,

health services, and education [for pastoralists] got a lot of prominence,
and there was recognition of pastoralists as an important sector in the
country needing attention. They even allocated resources, identified
roads to be developed and slaughterhouses to be built for the marketing
of livestock (Abkula 2002: 32).
Similar efforts took place with the equivalent process in Uganda, the drafting
of the Poverty Eradication Action Plan (PEAP) in 2003–2004 (Turner 2005).
They illustrate some of the ambiguities of government, power and knowledge.
The PRSPs are texts which are an important part of the way the state structures
its knowledge of pastoralism and its government of pastoralists; various bodies
claiming in different ways to represent pastoralists use various strategies to
contribute to those texts.
A technology of government more specific to pastoralism is the Pastoral Code,
versions of which have been enacted in various Sahelian countries (Hesse and
Thebaud 2006). These codes create presumptions of a right to pastoral mobility,
and, with rather more reservations, rights to the collective management of
customary rangelands. The Malian Charte Pastorale, for example, includes very
generalized statements on:

• pastoralists’ rights to move their animals over the national territory and into
neighbouring countries, and to use grazing land and natural water sources
freely and without charges being levied;
• pastoralists’ responsibilities to conserve, and participate in monitoring, the
environment;
• local authorities’ responsibilities to maintain corridors for pastoral migration,
and pastoralists’ right and obligation to use them;
• the responsibility of local authorities, with other stakeholders, to establish,
disseminate and enforce timetables for seasonal movements;
• an obligation by development projects and programmes to consider the needs
of pastoral activities, and compensate pastoralists for loss of use of land etc.;
• the inclusion of pastoral resource management in the competencies of local
authorities, with the authorities’ obligations to allow pastoral participation in
that management;
• the importance of pastoral organizations as privileged partners and advisers of
the state at various levels;
• the importance of local arbitration of disputes before they go to law.

None of these statements is unqualified, and there is very little detail on how they
can be operationalized.
As Hesse and Thebaud (2006) point out, the various Codes adopt a
technocratic, bureaucratic and ‘modernizing’ vision of pastoralism, which
incorporates assumptions about what constitutes productive land use (mise en

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John Morton

valeur) and privileges the creation of specific areas in which production can be
technically supervised and controlled. More fundamentally, the codes themselves
constitute ‘pastoralism’ as something outside the mainstream of rural society and
livelihoods.
Also at work in the Sahel, as well as in Uganda, is a far-reaching
decentralization of local government. This presents opportunities for pastoralists,
but also specific challenges. In Mali, where decentralization was partially driven
by the need for a political settlement after the Tuareg rebellion, major questions
have been raised about how it can be implemented in pastoral areas: how can the
requirements of decentralized administration be combined with pastoral mobility,
low population densities, and difficulties in mobilizing local revenue (Diarra et
al. 2004)? In Uganda, the territorial nature of decentralization may present
problems for pastoralists who constitute minorities in districts dominated by
sedentary cultivators (John Livingstone pers. comm.). A more general question
here, and an important agenda for future research, is how notions of space and
territory structure government, and whether and how pastoralist mobility
constitutes a challenge to this.10
One way in which NGOs and international organizations have elicited,
presented and validated pastoralist views has been the increasing trend for
‘pastoralist gatherings’. These typically take place in rural areas, with participants
staying in tents or shelters rather than buildings, and meeting under trees. In some
cases pastoralists from different countries, or even different continents, camp
side-by-side. Considerable amounts of funding and effort by national and
international development workers are committed to organizing the gatherings.11
The gatherings may be referred to by terms from pastoralist languages, such as
shirka (Abkula 2002) or manyatta12 even in written documentation in English.
Records of the meetings are often produced in a very visual style, with glossy
photographs and an emphasis on ‘exotic’ aspects such as ritual blessings,
colourful costumes, body modification etc. These gatherings can be seen as a
peculiar ‘technology’ in the Foucauldian sense, that asserts the common identity
of pastoralists across ethnic boundaries, states and even continents, produces
discourse about pastoralism and what pastoralists want, uses exoticism and visual
codes to label that discourse as authentic, but at the same time mobilizes networks
of advocacy between NGOs, donors and the state to feed that discourse into
government.
A pluralist view of power, those who use power and the technologies of
government is not just a tool for understanding, but also for identifying channels
of resistance. Thinking about particular ways in which pastoralists are represented
(e.g. Morton 2005, Morton et al. 2007) has led to the conclusion that there are no
‘magic bullets’, but that multiple strategies can and should be adopted: classic
advocacy to policy-makers, but also work through civil society groups, producer
organizations, modified forms of traditional leadership, decentralized local
government, the mass media, and new information and communication

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 Why Should Governmentality Matter for the Study of Pastoral Development?

technologies (Anderson et al. 2009). A pluralist and ‘capillary’ view of power

stimulates us to identify new and diverse strategies. The governmentality
literature demonstrates that it is important not to dichotomize institutions into
those that control and dominate pastoralists and those that are channels for their
resistance – all technologies of government, which are premised on some freedom
of those governed, allow for resistance and the exercise of power from below.

The Interactions of Discourse and Power

The preceding section has already touched on the way forms of knowledge, or
more broadly discourses, are also technologies of government. Classic cases are
censuses, and surveys which investigate the income and welfare of populations
(which therefore constitute population, welfare and income as things that are
knowable and measurable). As is well known, such censuses and surveys face
particular difficulties in dealing with pastoralists, and pastoralists are often
covered by summary or special surveys, or by unofficial manipulation of the data,
or omitted altogether.13 But pastoralists are also defined by forms of knowledge
of their livestock assets and their environment: livestock censuses, maps, range
surveys, the disciplines of range ecology, animal science and veterinary medicine
and of course an enormous amount of research, both academic and produced by
development projects. These serve as proxy forms of knowledge about them,
which feed into other technologies of government, but also serve to constitute
them as people with unique identification with, and dependency on, their
environment.
Discourses about pastoralists and pastoralism that are also technologies of
government do not only come from the state, and are not homogeneous. The
differences between state, donor and research discourses have already been
mentioned. Discourses may not accept the primacy of the pastoralist identity:
pastoralists and those who govern them may well assert particular ethnic,
religious or caste identifiers, or others such as ‘nomads’ or ‘indigenous peoples’.
Discourses may be unofficial, such as the pervasive use of the ethnic term balaalo
conflating Ugandan Bahima and Rwandan pastoralists, in much popular and
media discussion in Uganda.

Discourses of identity may exert what Hacking (2006) calls a ‘looping effect’ or
feedback onto the group so described. Hacking uses examples from psychiatry
and developmental psychology – the popularizing of scientific discourse has
made being a person with a multiple personality disorder or high-functioning
autism ‘a way to be a person’. Hacking’s notion of ‘making up people’ and some
of the ‘engines’ of the process (counting, bureaucracy, resistance) can easily be
transferred to ethnic groups, occupational groups or groups defined by the use of
the environment. It remains to be seen whether the increasing standardization of
the term pastoralist in development discourse and the discourse of events like the

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John Morton

pastoralist gatherings and ‘Pastoralist Days’ discussed above are looping back
into people’s self perceptions as pastoralists or as something else.
A fascinating example of the use of discourse and the assertion of knowledge
about pastoralism is found in the autobiography of President Museveni (1997:
19–22).14 As a very young man, Museveni and a few friends launched a personal
crusade to ‘eliminate nomadism’ among the Bahima: ‘urging and assisting the
pastoralists of North Ankole to settle down and modernize certain aspects of their
otherwise archaic, rough and inadequate lives’. His account of the episode
stresses education, conversation and creating linkages between concepts of
sedentarization, animal disease, education and modernity:
When they said: ‘How can we afford to pay for fencing our pasture?’ we
would ask them: ‘How many cattle do you lose in a year due to disease
as you wander far and near? The more you roam with cows in communal
grazing areas, the more likely they are to catch contagious disease’. They
would then begin to understand that if they fenced their land, they would
not lose their cattle (1997: 21).
Museveni presents the process as pure discourse; his ability, as a young student
with no official position, verbally to change the conduct of Bahima herders is
based on his own ability to link ideas of modernity, animal movement and animal
disease. There is no account, no genealogy, of where those linkages came from.
But of course he is writing this as President in 1997, when he had many other
powers and resources with which to change Bahima behaviour (such as the Ranch
Restructuring Board – see Muhereza and Otim 2002), and was exposed to many
different forms of knowledge. Both the reference to his early unofficial exercises
in persuasion, and the lengthy descriptions of the role of cows in traditional
Bahima culture which demonstrate his authentically Muhima identity,15 are
themselves discourses which are used to justify and broaden the base of his role
as traditional-but-modernizing, not just in the case of Bahima pastoralism, but in
Ugandan society more broadly.

Studying Marginalized Groups

A further justification for adopting a governmentality approach is that it has been
used extensively, indeed closely associated with, the study of various
marginalized groups within society – the sick, the mad and prisoners in Foucault’s
own work; early nineteenth-century paupers (Procacci 1993); and in recent
Australian work, the long-term unemployed, gay men, people living with
HIV/AIDS, and Aboriginal Australians (Ballard 1998, Dean 1998, O’Malley
1998). These are all groups that are not simply poor or powerless, but also defined
by society as ‘other’, and therefore requiring exceptional technologies of
government. If a comparison with pastoralism seems fanciful it should be noted
that the sole mention of pastoralists in early drafts of Uganda’s Plan for the
Modernization of Agriculture was alongside mention of ‘the handicapped’.

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 Why Should Governmentality Matter for the Study of Pastoral Development?

Difficulties with a Governmentality Approach

This section will consider certain linked difficulties raised by or about a

governmentality approach as it might be applied to pastoral development. The
first is that the language and style of argument of Foucault and later proponents
of the governmentality approach is obscure, in some views (Merquior 1985)
wilfully obscure. Key concepts are hard to grasp or subject to shifting definitions.
This objection is not trivial – pastoral development, like development studies in
general, is a field where clear communication between actors of very different
backgrounds and specialisms is important. In practice, however, development
research inspired by the governmentality approach wears its Foucauldianism
lightly. Works such as those of Corbridge et al. (2005) and Murray Li (2007) read
clearly as rich ethnographies of government that pay attention to the ways in
which discourse and knowledge structure government. They are not themselves
documents for development practitioners, though Corbridge and his colleagues
later used their analysis in a series of participatory workshops aimed at villagers
and local government officials.
A second objection is that the approach downplays political economy, control
of resources and conflict. It is undeniable that political economy is de-
emphasized in works of Foucault such as Discipline and Punish (1977) and in
much of the work by later users of a governmentality approach, in favour of
concentration on the ‘micro-physics of power’. It could be argued that it is there,
backstage: Dreyfus and Rabinow (1982: 129) note that Foucault was not
concerned to ‘deny the importance of capitalism’. Procacci’s work on poverty
(1991, 1993) makes reference to the fears of conflict and insurrection as the cities
of early nineteenth-century France filled with a floating population of the poor.
Pastoralists are not confronted by ‘advanced liberalism’ in the sense used by
Miller and Rose (2008), but by economies still characterized by raw imperatives
of controlling resources, states still involved in violent internal and external
conflict, and strategies of government marked by ‘colonial governmentality’.16
The changing stances of the Ugandan government towards the pastoralists of
Karamoja – co-option against the Lord’s Resistance Army, negotiation and
repression – form a stark example. But those conflicts and imperatives are still
identified, thought and expressed through discourses and knowledge, and except
in the most brutal instances of rule, addressed by technologies of government. A
study of pastoralism through a governmentality lens must strive to recognize and
incorporate the tensions of political economy and political ecology, but also take
nothing of them for granted.

The most fundamental objection is that Foucault’s own work lacks any vision of
progress, or any criteria against which to measure progress. Merquior (1985: 143)
talks of his work as ‘devoid of any vision of non-alienated social relations’,
characterized by political struggle for its own sake rather than for the sake of a

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more humane authority, as well as theoretically flawed in that his unceasing quest
to see the workings of power in knowledge ultimately undermines itself.
Merquior proclaims him ‘the founding father of Kathedernihilismus’ –
professorial nihilism (1985: 160). Parfitt, in a specifically development context,
rejects Foucault’s work as a basis for a critique of development on similar
epistemological grounds, but also because it is politically quietist:
And if all discourses are expressions of power, there is no reason to prefer
one to another. This line of thinking leads to a political quietism that
cannot be afforded by anybody who cares about those whose living
standards (whose lives) are being endangered in the South (Parfitt
2002: 59).
The stakes in pastoral development – famine, destitution, conflict – are high and
the networks of people involved in pastoral development are undoubtedly among
those who care about endangered livelihoods and lives.
There is a huge literature discussing, both negatively and positively, the
implications for political action of Foucault’s work (see Dean 1999, Lukes 2005
and many other references), and some evidence that Foucault’s own views on this
issue changed (Foucault 1988b). While Dean criticizes transcendental views of
the possibility of emancipating people from power itself, and (citing Cruikshank
1994) shows that the concept of ‘empowerment’ can itself be part of a technology
of rule, he also provides formulations, complex and careful, for reading
Foucault’s work in support of progressive politics, to ‘favour the possibilities of
the enhancement of self-government [or to] seek to diminish specific states of
domination’ (Dean 1999: 37).17
In practice, within the field of development research, authors using a
Foucauldian and/or governmentality approach have adopted a wide variety of
positions vis-à-vis the practice of development, understood as deliberate efforts
aimed at improvement by agencies including government (Thomas 2000),
especially work funded by multilateral and bilateral donor agencies, and
international NGOs. Ferguson (1994) is well known for critiquing development
as ‘the anti-politics machine’ and giving a studied refusal to suggest how it should
be reformed. Murray Li (2007) combines governmentality approaches with
perspectives from Gramsci, her commitment to particular communities and her
own occasional experience as a development consultant, to take a position as an
external but knowledgeable, and not wholly unsympathetic, critic of
development. Corbridge and his colleagues (2005), after research among Indian
villagers inspired partly by the governmentality approach, obtained extra funding
from a development donor to run participatory workshops and other activities,
including promotion of development theatre based on folk models, providing
information on villagers’ rights and the workings of government and of
development programmes, through which people ‘might point to concrete
suggestions for public policy reform’ (2005: 267). They endorse Dean’s (1999)

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 Why Should Governmentality Matter for the Study of Pastoral Development?

formulation of enhancing self-government and diminishing specific states of

domination. Agrawal (2005) provides a rich account of the history of forest
management in India, stressing the interplay of knowledge and power in fields
like the growth of statistical knowledge about forests. He gives an account of the
reforms by which villagers are now able to manage their forests which is
remarkably sympathetic to those reforms, and approvingly describes the way
many have turned into ‘environmental subjects’, internalizing what are by clear
implications desirable norms of conservation. It is clear that one can use
governmentality to adopt many different stances towards ‘development’ in
general, so there is no a priori reason it cannot be used for practical identification
of improved strategies for poor and vulnerable pastoralists, to ‘enhance their
possibilities of self-government’ and ‘to diminish specific states of domination’.

Key Questions

This exploration has aimed to show that the benefits of applying some of the
concepts and approaches associated with the term ‘governmentality’ to pastoral
development may be important, as a way into the discourses that constitute
pastoralists as a problematic category of people and the diverse technologies of
rule, well beyond what we have previously seen as government, administration or
policy, that affect them. While there are enormous philosophical debates about
Foucault’s work and its political implications, its commitment to laying bare tacit
assumptions and interconnections between knowledge and power in specific
cases remains attractive.
To make these remarks more concrete, I conclude with some of the tasks that
might characterize a governmental approach to research into pastoral
development. Given the emphasis on contingency and specificity discussed
above, these can be only guides, and not templates.
The first task will be to explore, in a given pastoral situation, the full range of
actors and institutions that seek to govern the conduct of pastoralists – various
levels of the state, NGOs, experts, development projects, pastoralists themselves.
The second will be to identify the forms of knowledge and discourses that not
only bolster or justify such government, but also constitute technologies of
government, of self-government, and resistance to government. These will
include the official, the academic and the popular; bye-laws, censuses, maps,
range surveys, project log-frames, ‘awareness material’, songs and rumours. The
assumptions and categories they tacitly depend upon will need to be brought out,
and their various genealogies traced.
The third task will be to explore how these knowledges are articulated and put
to use by pastoralists themselves and other actors in government – how they are
defining pastoralists as a category of people to be governed, and the task of
governing them. They must be related to broader conceptions of government –

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John Morton

nationally specific, developing country-specific, and global. In the light of the

widespread identification of pastoralists as poor and backward and of pastoralism
as environmentally problematic, they must in particular be related to conceptions
of the duty of states and donors to ‘develop’, promote growth, eradicate poverty
and conserve the environment. The local playing out of specific programmes of
government, such as: decentralization (with its assumptions of territoriality);
‘Agricultural Development-led Industrialisation’;18 Community Driven
Development;19 combatting desertification; adapting to climate change; or
universal enrolment in primary education, may form particular entry points. In all
of this, the work will be to point out ‘on what kinds of assumptions, what kinds
of familiar, unchallenged, unconsidered modes of thought the practices we accept
rest’ (Foucault 1988a). In the words of Miller and Rose (2008: 112):
The role of [analyses of govermentality] should not be to praise or blame,
but to diagnose, to identify the points of weakness that might be
exploited if we are to maximize the capacity of individuals and
collectivities to shape the knowledges, contest the authorities and
configure the practices that will govern them in the name of their
freedoms and commitments.

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Detlef Müller-Mahn, Girum Getachew and John Livingstone for

their encouragement to me to write this article, and Tobias Hagmann, Saverio
Krätli, Adrienne Martin and Pekka Virtanen for helpful comments on earlier
drafts. Responsibility for the final version is mine alone.

Notes

1. An important caveat is that researchers (especially Sandford 2006) are once more
raising the issue of human population growth and people/livestock/land ratios among
pastoralists, which can be seen as constraints to growth and causes of poverty that are
internal to pastoralism as a system and largely independent of policy issues. See also
the rejoinder by Devereux and Scoones (2006).
2. Gaventa goes on: ‘while simultaneously also more evidence-based and grounded in the
views of multiple stakeholders.’
3. Dean’s book of 1999 is a particularly clear exposition of the ideas of governmentality
and even includes a glossary, of which I make unashamed use in what follows.
4. But, as noted by Dean (1999: 210), ‘these forms of thought have been exported to large
parts of the globe owing to colonial expansion and the postcolonial set of international
arrangements of a system of sovereign states’.
5. The relation of ‘sovereignty’ to ‘bio-politics’, and to the ‘discipline’ exercised over
individuals and their bodies in Foucault’s writings is in fact more complex than this

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 Why Should Governmentality Matter for the Study of Pastoral Development?

(Foucault 1991, Dean 1999: 102). The combination of the two is seen in the idea of a
specifically colonial governmentality (Dutton 2009, and see below)
6. O’Malley (1998) also questions the way the governmentality approach has privileged
official discourse and therefore downplayed resistance, and uses ethnographic evidence
to show how Aboriginal Australians reshaped government programmes.
7. Mitchell (2002) is also an insightful set of essays on a developing country – Egypt – but
makes less use of ethnographic methods compared to detailed historical analysis.
8. But see Yeh (2005).
9. The two accounts differ somewhat in the emphasis given to the efforts of ordinary
pastoralists and ‘grassroots’ development workers vis-à-vis those of larger
organizations.
10. Space and territory are not extensively discussed by Foucault himself, or Dean, but
Elden 2007, discusses territory in the context of governmentality.
11. See for example UN OCHA-PCI and the Institute of Development Studies (2005) and
several other publications of the Pastoral Communication Initiative/Democracy,
Growth and Peace for Pastoralists Project in Ethiopia at http://www.pastoralists.org/
pages/publications.php. Related but raising similar issues is the annual ‘Pastoralist
Day’ established by NGOs but now celebrated with government encouragement across
Ethiopia (Hagmann and Mulugeta 2008).
12. http://data.iucn.org/wisp/documents_english/wisp_news2_english.pdf
13. The Ethiopian Agricultural Census of 2001/02 did not cover the pastoral areas of Afar
or the Somali region, which were instead covered by the Pastoral Areas Livestock
Enumeration (Central Agricultural Census Commission 2004). In 1982 in a pastoral
area of Sudan the author witnessed census returns for around one hundred pastoral
households given to census enumerators, themselves local men, entirely from memory
by two or three local leaders.
14. Muhereza and Otim (2002) were the first to use this text as evidence in research on
pastoral development.
15. His comment about growing up: ‘Apart from daily training for the discipline of work,
the mind was trained by story-telling’ (1997: 9) not only reveals fascinating
correspondences with Foucauldian thought, but also hints at a reflexive notion of what
he is doing in writing this autobiography.
16. For the latter see Dutton 2009.
17. The use of ‘self-government’ in this formulation is admittedly ambiguous, whether
Dean is sticking to a Foucauldian view of ‘practices of the self’ as part of capillary
power, or in a sense that makes some common ground with notions of emancipation.
18. The official development doctrine of Ethiopia.
19. A model for development programmes based on the participatory identification of
microprojects, promoted by the World Bank, and central to Bank-funded pastoral
development programmes in Kenya, Ethiopia and Mongolia.

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John Morton

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John Morton is Professor of Development Anthropology and Associate

Research Director at the Natural Resources Institute, University of
Greenwich. He has led research projects and carried out consultancy
assignments on many aspects of pastoral development, especially in the Horn
of Africa.
Email: J.F.Morton@greenwich.ac.uk.

30 NOMADIC PEOPLES (2010) VOLUME 14 ISSUE 1

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