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Climate change is increasingly becoming a threat to a wide range of community livelihoods in the agro-pastoral systems across scales. Hence, recovery from impacts caused by climate change requires rational decisions, particularly how resources and activities can be mobilized to enhance resilience. In this paper, we track pathways to recovery from such climate shocks in the agro-pastoral systems in three villages; Naitolia, MwakiniJuu and MswakiniChini in northern Tanzania. A mixed methods approach was used that entailed 120 questionnaire respondents and three focus group discussion sessions, one in each village. Our findings show that livelihood assets and activities are inadequate to buffer the impacts of climate change. Despite rules and regulations that guide resource utilization; communities will continue facing climate related impacts. This is due to inherent cultural dispositions that hinder transformation from one form of livelihood assets to the other. This restricts the reception of new frontiers of experiential knowledge that would allow for livelihood diversification outside the climate dependence scenario even after the occurrence of climate hazards. We argue that any attempt of building the resilience of any social-ecological system must consider the cultural backgrounds of the communities in which resilience building is sought., (© 2021. The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature.)