Abstract
Livestock mobility is a complex concept holding many different meanings for observers of pastoralism. The movement of African pastoralists with their livestock has historically been seen by outsiders as working against both environmental and development goals. Recently, there has been an embrace of the logics of livestock mobility while uncertainties persist of what it means and how it could be measured. In this void, various unexamined associations circulate tying livestock mobility to features of pastoral cultures, ecologies, and institutions. We review the empirical literature that has sought to measure and document livestock mobility, comparing two parameters of its components: grazing and travel mobility. We find strong similarities of daily grazing movements of herds around base locations (camps, villages, water points) but wide variation in the seasonal travel movement between base locations. This variation reflects the fact that mobility is not a cultural norm but responds to the nutrition needs of livestock. The magnitude of travel mobility parameters is the highest for those transhumance systems moving along latitudinal and elevation gradients, thus moving across variation that is more predictable than is commonly presumed in the pastoral literature. The implications of the observed spatialities of livestock mobility for pastoral institutions are discussed.
Highlights
Livestock mobility is a term that is increasingly used across a diverse set of forums including pastoral studies, rangeland ecology, social dimensions of climate change and conservation
Work has shown that the timing of the phenological events that trigger travel movements across this latitudinal range is remarkably regular from year to year which runs counter, at this scale, to notions that livestock mobility is solely governed by unpredictable variation of weather parameters (Brottem et al 2014)
If we couple this finding with a consideration of the nature of the ecological gradients on which other subSaharan African transhumance systems rely, such as altitudinal gradients and dry-season movements to floodplains or depression areas (Beauvilain 1977; Moritz et al 2013; Schmitz 1986; Gallais 1984; Dongmo et al 2012; Homewood and Rogers 1991; Mortimore 1989; Western and Dunne 1979; Scoones 1989), it is clear that a portion of the bio-physical variation that drives travel mobility is predictable at wider scales (Young et al 2013)
Summary
Livestock mobility is a term that is increasingly used across a diverse set of forums including pastoral studies, rangeland ecology, social dimensions of climate change and conservation. Work has shown that the timing of the phenological events (greening-up and senescence) that trigger travel movements across this latitudinal range is remarkably regular from year to year which runs counter, at this scale, to notions that livestock mobility is solely governed by unpredictable variation of weather parameters (Brottem et al 2014).
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