Practices such as enabling livestock mobility, providing supplementary feeding, diversifying livestock species and breeds, diversifying sources of income, adopting new technologies and so on, all aim to reliably supply livestock goods and services in the context of a highly variable resource base.
(Chatikobo and Ben Cousins, eds. 2025; accessed online at https://plaas.org.za/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/UWC-PLAAS-Research-Report-Livestock-Climate-Change-and-Land-Reform-in-Southern-Africa.pdf.pdf)
For me, the above quote is spot-on and pitch-perfect: Herd/er mobility is best introduced and discussed in combination with other (context-dependent) practices. Yet I think it’s fair to say that mobility of herds and herders is often singled out as central for pastoralist response to environmental variability. Certainly, the singling out of the consequences of restricting mobility remains notable for a field of otherwise case studies.
I want to offer a different reason for why really-existing practices associated with herd/er mobility deserve special attention over other practices in the epigraph. To telegraph ahead, mobility is special because its associated practices are best understood as the interconnections and their different configurations managed 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 with respect to that mosaic as part and parcel of “mobility”.
II
Let me start with an extended quote that gets to my 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]
Differentiating these links, connections and their reconfigurations, I argue, is especially important in understanding “the reiterated and regular presence and passage” I am calling mobility here.
How so?
III
Livestock move sequentially from here to there, but their inter-relationships with sites along the way are anything but 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 mobility discussions in the literature, 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 (the process variance) in response to task environment surprises and contingencies. Rather, the management itself becomes one of interconnecting (re-assembling) these options in order to transform high input variability into low variance, more stable outputs (including livelihoods). For example, the increased use of cellphones by pastoralists is not only a way to expand real-time management options in the 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.
Mobility of herds and herders in this perspective is first and foremost the way herders manage options so as to configure and reconfigure the sequential, reciprocal, mediated and pooled interconnectivities in response to input variability. Mobility is special because of its special role in process variance management flexed across scales. My wager is that some webs of herds/ers are better at that than others.
IV
So what?
Conceptually, it means treating “mosaics” as more than primarily a set of diverse property relations, or set of species in a habitat, or as a landscape or other unit. Practices associated with herding over time and space are to my mind central, and that is why I appeal to Nori (2019).
Practically, the notion of mosaic complexifies analysis–but usefully so. Why? Because it is now “mobility with respect to the mosaic(s) of interest,” not just: “mobility as a response to task environment variability.” Again, why? Because the mosaic is the intervening template for understanding interconnected exogenous and endogenous variabilities, now more granular than climate, prices, and conflict.
NB. For more on the different types of interconnectivity and their importance from an infrastructure perspective for understanding pastoralist systems, see especially:
WHEN COMPLEX IS AS SIMPLE AS IT GETS 