Pastoralist policy paradoxes in the Anthropocene. Relational ontologies and the marginalisation of lifeways among the Maasai (Tanzania), Hamar (Ethiopia), and the Fulani (the Sahel)

African pastoralists such as Fulani, Hamar, and Maasai have long been entangled in global narratives that misrepresent their ecological practices, moral worlds, and adaptive strategies. Within Anthropocene discourse and climate-policy frameworks, they are either being portrayed as vulnerable victims of the climate change crisis, or as culprits of ecological degradation, or security threats that destabilise fragile states. Such framings revive colonial tropes, reinforce climate determinism, obscure the political and historical drivers of inequality and devalue local livelihoods. Drawing on ethnographic, linguistic, and historical research, this article argues that pastoralists’ relational ontologies, rooted in mobility, multispecies cohabitation, ritual, language, and moral ecologies, offer alternative socio-ecological knowledge that challenge technocratic and reductionist approaches to climate governance. Through cases from Fulani (Sahel), Hamar (southwest Ethiopia), and Maasai (northern Tanzania), we demonstrate how pastoralist lifeworlds cultivate ways of living with uncertainty and unpredictability, which remain undertheorised and misrecognised in dominant policy frameworks and scientific narratives. Recognizing pastoralist modes of knowing and being in this world is thus not merely an ethical imperative; it is foundational for developing more fine-grained, situated, just, and pluriversal Anthropocene futures.

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This article has appeared in Pastoralism: Research, Policy and Practice 16:16130. doi: 10.3389/past.2026.16130.