Focusing on pastoralism, this article reflects on five diverse cases across Africa, Asia and Europe and asks: how have COVID-19 disease control measures affected mobility and production practices, marketing opportunities, land control, labour relations, local community support and socio-political relations with the state and other settled agrarian or urban populations? In response to the lockdown measures, we explore what innovations have emerged to secure livelihoods, through new forms of social solidarity and 'moral economy'. The cases examine how impacts and responses have been differentiated by class, age, wealth and ethnicity, and explore the implications for socioeconomic processes and political change in pastoral settings.

Pitched against the apparently more civilised and modern 'settled' folk, pastoralists have historically been penalised for the seemingly primitive and outdated practice of mobility. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in western India, this article challenges this reductive dichotomy and unpacks the many (im)mobilities produced, accessed, experienced and imagined by pastoralists. Adopting a relational lens, it shows how mobilities and immobilities co-constitute and are contingent on each other across social, geographical and temporal scales. Embedded within their own social and political history, the many forms of (im)mobilities can not only ontologically dispel the homogenizing effects of rigid typologies, but also but also practically offer pastoralists the capacity to adapt to changing times.

Today there is a disjuncture between migration flows that are complex, mixed and constantly evolving and the emerging global migration governance paradigm that seeks to impose clarity, certainty, regularity and order. Addressing the gap between policies and realities, this article explores lessons for migration policy and governance from mobile pastoralists’ experience. Using examples from human migration flows within and between Europe and Africa and insights from pastoral systems from India, Italy and Kenya, the article identifies important similarities between international migration and pastoral mobility. We focus on four interconnections: both international migration and pastoral mobility show multi-directional and fragmented patterns; both involve multiple, intersecting socio-economic, political, cultural and environmental drivers; both must respond to non-linear systems, where critical junctures and tipping points undermine clear prediction and forecasts, making social navigation and reliability management more useful concepts than risk-based prediction and control and finally for both uncertainty is not conceived of as a state of crisis but an inherent feature, pregnant with possibility and hope. Building on these four points, and drawing from pastoralists’ experiences, we propose some methodological, practical and policy reflections for bridging the disjuncture between migration realities on the ground and global migration governance policies and discourses.