Criticizing resilience thinking: A political ecology analysis of droughts in nineteenth-century East Africa

The looming alteration in climate has spurred a veritable industry over the past two decades of overly simplistic scenario modeling and theoretical predictions of future changes brought about by global warming, some based on research on human responses to fluctuations in rainfall and temperature in the past. Scholars who stress the complexity of climate and social processes have critiqued such crude models from two different approaches: resilience thinking and political ecology. In this article, I assess the resilience framework through an analysis of the effects of droughts over a long time perspective, between circa 1800 and 1950, in two East African communities: the Kamba of Kenya and the Gogo of Tanzania. My conclusion is that political ecology theory provides a better explanation than the resilience approach. In both cases, rather than primarily adapting to climate events, the ability of communities and households to cope with droughts varied depending on how they were integrated into regional economies and the world system when those droughts occurred. The effects of droughts and long-term fluctuations in precipitation were mediated through exchange networks, the flow of currencies, and the processes of stratification in local resource control, which in turn affected land use and settlement patterns.