AUTHOR=Menestrey Schwieger Diego Augusto 
  
TITLE=“Social tipping points” in a dryland pastoral system in Namibia
  
JOURNAL=Pastoralism: Research, Policy and Practice
  
VOLUME=Volume 16 - 2026
  
YEAR=2026
  
URL=https://www.frontierspartnerships.org/journals/pastoralism-research-policy-and-practice/articles/10.3389/past.2026.15600
  
DOI=10.3389/past.2026.15600
  
ISSN=2041-7136
  
ABSTRACT=Critical transitions in ecosystems occur when a “tipping point” is crossed, resulting in an abrupt shift to a new stable state that is almost impossible, to reverse. These changes produce severe socio-economic consequences, often displaying typical characteristics of tipping points at various societal levels, particularly in positive feedbacks, non-linearity, and irreversibility. These societal phenomena are analogously referred to as “negative social tipping points.” However, empirical studies examining the real-world dynamics of these social tipping points remain limited in scope, leaving unanswered questions about their significance in different contexts, the underlying causes and processes, and potentials for preventative human actions. This paper explores what such a social tipping point might be like within a specific social-ecological system: Namibian dryland pastoralism. Adopting a qualitative, ethnographic approach, this paper focuses on pastoralists who lost all their livestock. It investigates region-specific social and ecological factors that lead to such hardship, portraying people’s experiences throughout this process. This includes their views on what it means to ‘lose everything’ and their endeavours to restart livestock farming. It considers how to prevent other households in the region from facing similar challenges, and examines how pastoral lifestyles can be maintained in the face of ongoing rangeland degradation and climate change effects in the Anthropocene. Based on this analysis, the paper considers whether these social dynamics can be classified as social tipping points and, further, evaluates the usefulness of this classification in describing the observed phenomena.