Vol. 9 · Nos. 1 & 2 · 2005

Hanne Kirstine Adriansen

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Introduction
Mobility is often regarded as an important characteristic of pastoral societies and their ways of production in Africa. However, the interpretation of the rationale and importance of pastoral mobility changes along with the various discourses and depending on the professional background of the researcher. While the positive perception of mobility is relatively new among researchers of drylands, this is not a new line of thought among social scientists studying pastoralists (e.g. Dyson-Hudson and Dyson-Hudson 1980, Stenning 1957). Both anthropologists (e.g. Dyson-Hudson 1966, Evans-Pritchard 1940, Nicolaisen 1963, Stenning 1959) and others studying pastoral societies (e.g. Gallais 1967, Johnson 1969) have pointed to the flexible strategies employed by pastoralists. In the late 1980s, a new understanding of drylands dynamic gained importance and led to the so-called ‘new rangeland paradigm’which has been called the ‘stateand-transition’ paradigm (Westoby et al. 1989) or ‘instability-but-persistence’ paradigm (Warren 1995). The first papers concerned dryland functioning, but soon implications for pastoral management, and hence pastoral mobility, were included (e.g. Ellis and Swift 1988). This meant that concepts such as degradation and desertification were reinterpreted and it has now been demonstrated that ‘sustainable resource management’ is far from equivocal. This review will show how pastoral mobility is understood in the context of range ecology, the focus being on how pastoralists’ perceptions can add to this understanding.