Many regions that are endowed with scarce natural resources such as arable land and water, and which are remote from a central government, suffer from violence and ethnic strife. A number of studies have looked at the convergence of economic, political and ecological marginality in several African countries. However, there is limited empirical study on the role of violence in pastoral livelihoods across ecological and geographical locations. Yet, case studies focusing on livelihood and poverty issues could inform us about violent behaviour as collective action or as individual decisions, and to what extent such decisions are informed or explained by specific climatic conditions. Several case studies point out that violence is indeed an enacted behaviour, rooted in culture and an accepted form of interaction. This article critically discusses the relevance of geographical and climatic parameters in explaining the connection between poverty and violent conflicts in Kenya’s pastoral areas. These issues are considered vis-à-vis the role institutional arrangements play in preventing violent conflict over natural resources from occurring or getting out of hand. The article uses long-term historical data, archival information and a number of fieldwork sources. The results indicate that the context of violence does not deny its agency in explanation of conflicts, but the institutional set-up may ultimately explain the occurrence of the resource curse.

In the face of the current focus on climate change, the question whether climate variations have effects on ethnic violence is addressed. This article shows the results of an empirical study on the relationship between violent livestock raiding and climatic conditions. The practice of livestock raiding causes large numbers of casualties in northern Kenya. While conflicts over scarce resources may be largely explained by drought conditions, population pressure, and access problems, livestock raiding is more violent during wet seasons, when pasture and water are abundant and when the livestock is in good health. The higher incidence of violent deaths during wet times hints at opportunistic behaviour of raiders.

It has become increasingly clear that desertification can only be tackled through a multi-disciplinary approach that not only involves scientists but also stakeholders. In the DESIRE project such an approach was taken. As a first step, a conceptual framework was developed in which the factors and processes that may lead to land degradation and desertification were described. Many of these factors do not work independently, but can reinforce or weaken one another, and to illustrate these relationships sustainable management and policy feedback loops were included. This conceptual framework can be applied globally, but can also be made sitespecific to take into account that each study site has a unique combination of bio-physical, socio-economic and political conditions. Once the conceptual framework was defined, a methodological framework was developed in which the methodological steps taken in the DESIRE approach were listed and their logic and sequence were explained. The last step was to develop a concrete working plan to put the project into action, involving stakeholders throughout the process. This series of steps, in full or in part, offers explicit guidance for other organizations or projects that aim to reduce land degradation and desertification.

The geographical concentration of persistent poverty in so-called less-favoured areas calls for a critical look at the link between poverty and environment. Livelihood studies tend to focus on poverty at the individual level, whereas the concept of less-favoured area implies a problem for the collective. Studies on vulnerability tend to be biased towards external ecological causes at the regional level, while studies on coping and survival usually focus on the household. However, recent insights about the internal and external dimension of livelihood vulnerability in less-favoured areas provide an argument for linking both dimensions to dynamics at the individual and collective level. At an aggregate level, individual and household responses to vulnerability lead to intended and unintended effects, while there is also evidence of collective responses to factors originating from the external vulnerability context. These linkages between the external and internal dimensions of vulnerability and responses at the individual, aggregate and collective level should be studied to understand and mitigate current trends of increasing vulnerability of livelihoods in less-favoured areas. Emerging key issues are analysis of change, analysis of livelihood pathways, aggregate consequences of behaviour, and cultural dynamics. ContextThe RESPONSE research program is a joint research program by Wageningen University and Research Centre (WUR) and the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) that was initiated in 2001. RESPONSE is the acronym for Regional Food Security Policies for National Resource Management and Sustainable Economies. The program has a spatial focus on less-favoured areas. Though this paper addresses issues dealt with by the RESPONSE Working Program 2, namely livelihoods and food security, it has a broader scope because it also reviews recent empirical evidence on the subject other than the findings yielded by this working program. It includes the results of recent (2000-5) research on livelihoods in less-favoured areas, more in particular work carried out by researchers of the Dutch research schools Mansholt Graduate School (MGS) and the Research School for Resource Studies for Development (CERES). In this paper less-favoured areas are not just treated as a given context. Instead, the emphasis is on the dynamics of the interfaces between characteristics of less favoured areas and the livelihoods of people in those areas, and the implications of this for vulnerability.

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