1. New Narrative: The last thing you should expect is the end of pastoralism(s)
I type “collapse of pastoralist societies?” into Google search and get this AI-generated answer:
Pastoralist societies have been declining for a variety of reasons, including:
- Lack of government support: Pastoral communities receive little support from their governments.
- Loss of land: Pastoralists have lost access to land due to the development of large-scale cultivation and irrigation, the establishment of nature reserves and game parks, and the imposition of national boundaries.
- Climate change: Climate change has threatened the availability of water and arable land, which are critical for pastoralism.
- Government policies: Governments have expropriated land from pastoralists, and converted communal property systems to open access situations.
- Migration: Some pastoralists have moved to populous areas to pursue education, abandoning traditional lifestyles.
- Conflict: Conflict, disease, drought, and famine have particularly affected vulnerable pastoralist communities.
- Arms proliferation: Arms proliferation has significantly altered the pastoralism landscape.
No surprises here. This is the gist of what we’ve been reading for years. But the obvious question remains from the standpoint of our framework of pastoralists as reliability professionals and pastoralism as a critical infrastructure: How many pastoralists see this in the same way or for similar reasons?
I don’t know that number, but I most certainly see how some herders believe their pastoralist systems are changing dramatically but nevertheless adhere to a very different narrative of what is going on and being responded to.
To see how, turn to a recent article that describes the parallel case: Urban people who see it inevitable that modern societies are also collapsing but who act differently than expected.
In his 2024 “The conviction of the inevitable: Collapsism and collective action in contemporary rural France,” Jérôme Tournadre, a political scientist and sociologist, wonders why some people who are totally convinced of the inevitability of collapse in modern (“thermo-industrial”) societies–for them, it’s self-evident the collapse is already underway–respond predictably by moving to the countryside and but then act unexpectedly there. They did not “go back to nature” nor did they eschew all things modern and technological:
Sophie, for example, has no trouble using a thermal brush cutter when it comes to freeing agricultural commons from overly invasive vegetation. Alex earns a little money by occasionally installing photovoltaic panels for individuals. However, he does not see the need to use it at home insofar as his connection to the electricity grid satisfies him. Similarly, if the members of the neo-village [one of the research sites] have chosen to gradually do without cars, it is not to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions but, above all, to no longer depend on oil that is bound to become rare or to lose its usefulness in a collapsed world. This logic obviously leads them to use bicycles but also to learn how to handle and maintain tools such as the scythe, the lumberjack’s handsaw or the Japanese saw that is supposed to replace both the chainsaw and the jigsaw. The acquisition of new skills is in any case a central ambition within these collective actions, which endeavour to break away from the specialization found in industrial civilization and develop a versatility more in line with troubled times: knowing how to milk goats and process their milk, graft fruit trees, recognize wild plants and mushrooms, etc.
Now turn this lens toward pastoralists. Say you do find pastoralists who are convinced that their systems are collapsing and that collapse is inevitable. We nonetheless must ask: So what?
So yes, pastoralists tell you they now use new tools while acquiring different skills, but still continue to milk the goats, process milk and collect local herbs. Yes, you see them cutting firewood for cooking but relying on electricity where available. Yes, they readily undertake money-paying jobs off-site to support household livelihoods, including those related to livestock. Yes, you see them breaking away from the specializations of older pastoralisms and developing more versatility and newer options related to that livestock.
Yes, there are pastoralists, like some urbanites, who are alarmed by current events and situations. But their response is more like whistleblowers who still live among us while pressing: “Something’s wrong here and it has to change and here’s what I have to say and am doing” (see the above link).
2. New Narrative: Not only is pastoralism harder to assetize than other critical infrastructures, it’s also too-big-to-fail in positive respects
Livestock or water points or fencing or motorbikes or vet stocks and such are treated as assets. But the question here is: “Has pastoralism as a global infrastructure been assetized and securitized as fully as the other infrastructures today?” My answer: not entirely, and significantly so.
Start with the fact that the current privatization literature focuses on how schools, health facilities, and large infrastructure projects are assetized for the purposes of securing rents and profits over time. Critics understandably see these changes in negative terms.
If so, why then are persistent failures and difficulties in establishing—read: assetizing—fixed-point pastoralist schools, stationary pastoralist health facilities, and settled livestock projects treated in overwhelmingly negative terms by like-minded critics? Some of these “failures” are in fact those of having prevented full-scale assetization, or which is presumably a positive outcome for some.
Or to put the point from another direction: By viewing pastoralism as hard-to-assetize infrastructure, we see a different longer-term operating horizon at work than we would be the case, were its assets financialized as easily as it has been for other infrastructures. Indeed, for this reason and others, I suggest that pastoralism, as a global infrastructure, is too-big-to-fail in significant respects (and which, in turn, explains the persistence of pastoralisms).
Too big to fail has been used negatively in the 2008 financial crisis to describe systematically important banks and financial institutions. I use the term in its more mixed positive sense where variation in policy and management practices centers around the logic of requisite variety in critical infrastructures, like pastoralism, with highly variable inputs and mandates for low and stable (reliable) outputs. According to the principle of requisite variety, these conditions and mandates produce a set of dynamic management options and improvisations that, while no longer looking like older pastoralism–e.g., herding households now use plastic buckets instead of earthen gourds–nonetheless serve the same functional role as in the older systems. This pressure to generate and assemble new or improvised options to transform highly variable inputs into reliable outputs is global because critical infrastructures (and their logic of requisite variety) are global.
This notion that different practices (resources, options, strategies) can serve the same function (as part of a dynamic process variance to translate high inputs into low and stable outputs) is especially crucial to recasting narratives of herd/er mobility for more relevant policy and management purposes.
3. New Narrative: Herd/er mobility is very different today, and so too its policy and management implications differ from current understandings
I want to offer a different reason for why really-existing practices associated with herd/er mobility deserve special attention. To telegraph ahead, mobility is special because its associated practices are best understood as the interconnections and their different configurations managed spatially and temporally by herders for what are still called the factors of livestock production (land, water, labor)
Livestock “moving between different sites with variable forage resources within a mosaic of harvested crop fields, open pastures and thickets” (Semplici et al, 2024; https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/26395916.2024.2396928) necessarily refers to more than the uni-directional interconnection of livestock and herders moving from a ‘here’ to a ‘there.’ Shifts in reciprocal, mediated and pooled interconnectivity are also being managed as part and parcel of “mobility”. The policy and management implications are major.
II
Let me start with an extended quote that gets to this take-home message directly (Nori 2019):
To tackle the uncertainty settings embedding their livelihoods, pastoralists strategically adapt their range, herd, and household resources and continuously reconfigure use as much as the interrelationships amongst land, livestock, and labour according to conditions. This dynamics and constant recombination creates a mosaic of strategies where concepts such as intensification, diversification, and the individual, public, and collective fade and combine according to places, seasons, and periods in what d’Elie (2014b:4) describes as ‘”patching up” (Van Wageningen, Wenjun, 2001; Takayoshi, 2011; Hadjigeorgiou, 2011; López-i-Gelats, 2013; Manoli et al., 2014; Moreira et al., 2016; Ragkos et al., 2018). Connections with other societal actors—including urban dwellers, market agents and farming communities—help expand available opportunities and contribute to an overall diversification of livelihood patterns to complement and support their livestock-centred economy. . . .
Following the important changes and innovations that have reconfigured pastoral livelihoods, rangelands are being reorganized accordingly as mosaics of different but functionally interconnected landscape units. In order to exploit existing and fluctuating opportunities (e.g. seasonal rainfall—but also market pricing related to religious festivities or localized subsidy schemes—rangelands and more generally pastoral territories are reorganized accordingly as webs of linked nodes. These webs serve to connect and articulate resources, actors, and opportunities at different levels and scales through ‘reticular’ dynamics that make these mosaics manageable and governable (Tache, 2013; Gonin and
Gautier, 2015; Nori, 2010; Apolloni et al., 2018).Nodes are strategic hubs that concentrate specific resources and opportunities, including strategic range resources, money, information, services, people, and social connections. In rangeland settings these are typically water points (Lewis, 1961), market places, hot grazing spots (Motta et al., 2018), wetland pastures and dryland farming plots, communal range enclosures (Tache, 2013), urban settings and rural towns, milk collection areas (Nori, 2010), and animal health facilities.
Links are lines that cut through rangelands providing for interstitial, albeit relevant, resources and critical connections. These are typically transhumance routes, market channels, range corridors, main roads, and river banks.
The connections between diverse territorial assets and their articulations in the wider reticulum are governed by tailored sets of rules and regulations that define roles and responsibilities. The reiterated and regular presence and passage through certain territories is key to generating and stabilising herders’ territorialities and ensuring tight links between a group/clan/community and its range territories (Gautier et al. 2005; Bonnet et al., 2010).
[accessed online at https://cadmus.eui.eu/server/api/core/bitstreams/0e201842-8218-5bd1-9661-502a6d2863ed/content; my underlines]
In other words, even when livestock move sequentially from here to there, their inter-relationships with those sites along the way are anything but serially uni-directional.
Reciprocal (bi-directional) relationships are also much discussed in the literature (the stubble for livestock, the manure for the field). Extensively-raised livestock fattened up at special sites just before sale or slaughter are examples of a mediated interconnection between the herders and that off-take. The grazing itinerary of moving livestock across time and space is a kind of pooled interconnectivity guiding the herders and herds involved. More, shifts in configurations are a centerpiece of other mobility discussions, e.g., improvising and responding opportunistically, case by case, as livestock and herders move along the itinerary, if there is one.
In infrastructural terms, what is going on here is not only widening and extending the repertoire of management options (again, the process variance) in response to task environment surprises and contingencies and mandates for reliable outputs. Rather, management itself also becomes one of interconnecting (re-assembling) these options in order to transform high input variability into low variance, more stable outputs (including livelihoods).
III
For example, the much-remarked-upon use of cellphones by pastoralists is not only a way to expand real-time management options in their face of task volatility. There is a scale issue here as well that comes with shifting sequential, reciprocal, mediated and pool interconnectivities–and cellphone use is especially adept at accommodating and monitoring scale shifts.
Not only are feed-stock and water brought to the herd rather than at the older scales, but livestock are reared and fattened at altogether at different scales and in different than before (e.g., Hoffmann, Schareika, Dittrich, Schlecht, Sauer and Buerkert, 2023). In some cases, the time and space of mobility are best understood as condensed; in other cases, the time and space of mobility are better understood as lengthened, as in livestock export supply chains (e.g., Duffield and Stockton 2023). But either way–now more near-linked or now more far-linked–mobility remains functionally part of the logic of requisite variety.
So what? Conceptually, the unit and level of analysis is now “mobility with respect to the setting and scale(s) of interest,” not just: “mobility as a response to task environment variability.” This is because setting and scale are the intervening template for understanding interconnected exogenous and endogenous variabilities, now more granular than the critics’ usual suspects of climate, prices, and conflict. That the older temporal and spatial movements no longer occur, again, does not mean that herd/er mobility has disappeared.
As for practically, condensed/enlarged mobility means we are light-years away from the older discussions of the effects of disappearing wet season grazing on herd movements.
Implications
So then, are we to conclude that everything is hunky-dory and copacetic for pastoralists? No. I am, however, asking you to draw implications for priority policy and management attention from these–well very different–ways of understanding pastoralist development. In the bluntest terms possible, the key here is to shift the policy analytic focus from the economic logic of capitalist relations to the institutional (actually, cybernetic) logic of requisite variety in critical infrastructures found not just under capitalism.
To see how this works by way of implications, focus on the most important finding in the current pastoralist literature. Yes, pastoralists are being displaced from their past herding sites by land encroachment, sedentarization, and climate change, among other economic factors. But the three narratives compel us to first answer much more specifically: So what?
Focus on that subgroup of displaced pastoralists who are reliability professionals, namely those networks of pastoralists (if any) who are skilled in systemwide pattern recognition and localized scenario formulation. One major question becomes what are the compensation, investment and steering policies of government and international agencies to address this displacement (e.g., see Bürgisser 2023).
That is, where are the policies and management protocols to: (1) compensate such skilled herders for loss of productive livelihoods, (2) upskill these herders further in the face of eventually losing their current employment, and (3) efforts to steer herding economies and markets in ways that do not lose out if and where new displacement occurs?
By way of answer, I am aware of no such national policies. Yet, it’s precisely these missing pieces that should be on the UN agenda for the 2026 International Year of Rangelands and Pastoralists.
Lastly, the three narratives suggest we spend more time asking ourselves and others, “What is it that we don’t hear in official or formal discussions of pastoralist development but should now expect to?” My list includes the following three:
–“We must fight for the expansion of pastoralism as a universal public infrastructure, just as is now being done for universally available electricity!”
–Pastoralists explain their responses to government, donors and NGOs this way: “We corrected a few things on the ground. Our job, after all, is to protect you.”
–“We refuse to play the game that starts with tables and numbers of livestock. Why? Because the follow-on question, almost immediately, is: ‘Who owns the livestock?’ and, sooner than a blink of the eye, we are down to: ‘But what about the old woman with 5 goats or fewer?’ Which in turn becomes: ‘What are you going to do about these inequalities!’ As if the most ethical response weren’t to first determine more effective ways to think about this than one starting with counts of livestock owned and held.
Additional References
Bürgisser, R. 2023. Policy Responses to Technological Change in the Workplace. JRC Working Papers Series on Social Classes in the Digital Age 2023/04. European Commission, Seville (accessed online at https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/handle/JRC130830)
Duffield, M. and N. Stockton 2023. “How capitalism is destroying the Horn of Africa: sheep and the crises in Somalia and Sudan,” Review of African Political Economy (accessed online at https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/03056244.2023.2264679)
Hoffmann E., N. Schareika, C. Dittrich, E. Schlecht, D. Sauer, and A. Buerkert 2023. “Rurbanity: a concept for the interdisciplinary study of rural–urban transformation” Sustainability Science (accessed online at
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11625-023-01331-2)
Roe, E. 2020a. A New Policy Narrative for Pastoralism? Pastoralists as Reliability Professionals andS Pastoralist Systems as Infrastructure, STEPS Working Paper 113, Brighton: STEPS Centre (accessed online at https://steps-centre.org/publication/a-new-policy-narrative-for-pastoralism/)
———. 2020b. “Pastoralists as reliability professionals.” PASTRES blog (accessed online at https://pastres.org/2020/04/17/pastoralists-as-reliability-professionals/)
———. 2023. “The global infrastructure of pastoralist systems.” PASTRES blog (accessed online at https://pastres.org/2023/06/09/the-global-infrastructure-of-pastoralist-systems/)
———. 2026. “Rethinking pastoralists’ development from their perspective of disasters-averted.” Pastoralism 16 (accessed online at https://doi.org/10.3389/past.2026.15551)
WHEN COMPLEX IS AS SIMPLE AS IT GETS 