Shocks and Cultural Adaptations: A Case Study From Northern Kenya

This paper examines how the Rendille pastoralists of Northern Kenya navigate environmental and political shocks, offering insights into governance and resilience from below. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, it shows how legal pluralism, patronage networks, and culturally grounded adaptation strategies shape responses to drought, resource scarcity, and inter-tribal conflict. Rendille practices highlight the limitations of models that treat resilience as dependent on centralized state capacity, emphasizing instead Indigenous and Local Knowledge, selective cooperation, and information-sharing networks. Micro-level decisions—such as herd mobility guided by foretellers, environmental scouting, and cooperative clusters—produce macro-level system dynamics, including public and secret informational registers that coordinate resource access and collective action. Interactions between opportunistic, patronage-based interventions and local strategies create nonlinear and unpredictable outcomes, suggesting the relevance of complexity theory for simulating scenarios to inform context-sensitive and flexible policies that support structural resilience without reinforcing clientelist dependencies.