ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the authors focus on existing and emerging debates signified by the two key terms of their title, namely 'non-equilibrium' and 'nomadism'. They review debates regarding knowledge production and policy intervention in dryland environments and in relation to pastoralist/nomadic peoples. For ease of organization and readership the authors focus first on ecological debates, and second on socio-cultural aspects with the important provision that these domains are overlapping and cross-cutting in all areas of discussion and 'reality'. In perhaps idealized terms, pastoral/nomadic living affirms, manages and responds to the variable productivity of drylands through maintaining heterogeneity and diversity in socio-economic practices. The assumptions of a colonizing and globalizing modernity have influenced state policy and development interventions in drylands. While cognisant of the problems of essentializing categories, a view is emerging that an expanding frontier of modernity in drylands has tended to have a particularly disempowering impact on women.
