The pace of pastoral mobility: Exploring adaptations to climate and socio-economic change in Western India

Abstract

Mobility is acknowledged as a key practice through which pastoralists adapt to climatic and socio-economic stressors. Yet, ‘how’ it is enacted and experienced is less understood. By approaching mobility through the lens of pace, this article explores how the Rabari pastoralists of western India plan, organise and embody their movements at the intersection of weather and crop cycles, animal and human lifecycles, production objectives, social relations and affective experiences, embedded in their own history and politics. It unpacks dynamics at four integrated scales – the intra-day, intra-seasonal, inter-seasonal and long-term scale, which, while foregrounding the temporal, incorporates multiple spatial scales – from the field, to the village and the region – and social scales – from the individual flock to the migrating group and the community – to tease out key interlinkages for pastoral mobility. It shows how pastoralists seize unique opportunities through flexible and precise movements. It indicates the ways in which pastoral mobility produces and is produced by myriad human and more-than-human entanglements, while also intersecting with multiple mobilities including those of people, goods and capital, that all impinge on each other. Further, these movements are experienced affectively and differentially by each member of the household and community, across intersections of age, gender and wealth status. Finally, ‘pace’ disrupts the ‘sedentist bias’ often found in pastoral development that not only privileges spatial concerns but also a framework of fixity, regularity, and boundedness that counters the flexibility, ambiguity and multiplicity characteristic of pastoral mobility, adaptation and attunement to context. It reveals mobility as adaptive capacity and opens inquiry into new avenues of action to address growing challenges, and secure pastoralism's current and future contribution to food and livelihood security as well as benefits to climate mitigation and nature conservation.