Pastoralism is the subsistence strategy for areas such as deserts, mountains or tundra which
are too marginal for alternative uses. Especially the drylands in Africa are relatively low in
their productive potential for agriculture due to meagre and variable rainfall and short
growing seasons (Mortimore 1998: 4). Thus, pastoralism is the dominant form of land use
throughout the drier regions (< 300mm rain per year) of the African continent, including
Namibia (Bonte and Galaty 1991: 3). The sustainable management of natural resources is
therefore important to guarantee future livelihoods in this region.
In recent years the debate on essential factors for a sustainable use of natural resources in arid
savannas has gained new momentum (Ngaido 2002, Niamir 1990, Lane and Morehead 1995,
Müller et al. submitted). In order to gain a greater understanding of this, it seems an especially
promising approach to analyse local management strategies. Local knowledge is seen as a key
to understanding pastoralist strategies of sustainable resource management(Payton et al. 2003,
Schareika 2001, Niamir 1990, Niamir- Fuller 1999). It is particularly interesting to investigate
how local knowledge is produced and used in a highly unpredictable system, characterised by
such non-linear dynamics such as transition and randomness (Little in Bassett 2003: 163).
OvaHerero pastoralists in the arid north-western parts of Namibia have to deal with
rangelands that are characterized by a high spatial and temporal variability of resources, such
as fodder biomass. My interest is to investigate one important element of local coping systems:
the local knowledge of OvaHerero pastoralists regarding livestock-environment relationships.
This knowledge enables herders to deal with uncertainty, variability, perturbations and risk1
,
such as for example the lack of rain and the variable amount of biomass available. Thus, local
environmental knowledge is one coping mechanism, as it contains information and
expectation about natural resources and helps to develop strategies that reduce risk.