Livestock mobility in sub-Saharan Africa: A critical review

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.