This session explores how pastoralist communities across East Africa’s drylands are redefining resilience through mobility, Indigenous knowledge, social networks and locally led governance. Challenging top-down, project-driven approaches that measure access over wellbeing and celebrate adaptation without addressing power, the panel calls for a shift from engineered resilience to locally defined and community-led systems – demanding that climate finance, land governance, and rangeland investment be redesigned with pastoral communities at the centre, not at the receiving end.