Sustainability and Pastoral Livelihoods: Lessons from East African Maasai and Mongolia

“Sustainable development” currently has a firm grip on the lexicon of development agencies from the World Bank to small nongovernmental organizations, but it offers little practical guidance for tackling diverse problems in specific places. The concept is of particular importance to pastoral populations throughout the world—those people dependent on livestock raising in arid or semiarid lands whose survival depends on their ability physically and politically to maintain access to their pastures. This paper compares two pastoralist populations—East African Maasai and pastoralists of Mongolia—to discuss recent changes in the pastoral way of life and to describe what sustainability has meant in the past and what sustainability needs to mean in the future for pastoralist populations.