Pastoralism at Scale on the Kazakh Rangelands: From Clans to Workers to Ranchers

Eurasia contains the world's largest contiguous rangelands, grazed for millennia by mobile pastoralists' livestock. This paper reviews evidence from one Eurasian country, Kazakhstan, on how nomadic pastoralism developed from some 5,000 years ago to the present. We consider a timespan covering pre-industrial, socialist and capitalist periods, during which pastoral social formations were organized in terms of kinship, collective state farms, and private farms and ranches. The aim is to understand how events over the last 100 years have led to the sequential dissolution and re-formation of the social units necessary to manage livestock across a wide expanse of spatially heterogenous and seasonally variable rangeland ecosystems. It is argued that the social scale of extensive livestock management must be tailored to the geographical scale of biotic and abiotic conditions. The paper starts by pointing out the long duration of mobile pastoralism in the Kazakh rangelands and provides an overview of how events from the late 17th C onwards unraveled the relationships between Kazakh nomads' socio-economic units of livestock management and the rangeland environment. At present, mobile animal husbandry is not feasible for the majority of Kazakh livestock owners, who operate solely within small family units without state support. These reformulated post-Soviet livestock grazing patterns are still undergoing rapid change, influencing the composition of rangeland vegetation, wildlife biodiversity, and rates of carbon sequestration. By concentrating capital and landed resources, a minority of large-scale pastoralists have been able to re-extensify by combining mobility with selective intensification, including an increased reliance on cultivated feed. Current state and international efforts are leaving out the majority of small-scale livestock owners and their livestock who are unable to either intensify or extensify at sufficient scale, increasing environmental damage, and social inequality.