Edited by: Nathan Jensen, Simon Wagura Ndiritu, Kelvin Shikuku, and Abdrahmane Wane

Globally, there is a growing demand for livestock and livestock products, leading to a keen interest among governments, development partners and researchers in enhancing pastoral markets. At the same time, engaging with markets can help pastoralists, which hold large portions of the national herds in many countries and depend on livestock for much of their income, increase income and reduce their vulnerability to drought. However, pastoralists often appear to maintain much larger herds than are optimal and engage with markets only when necessary rather than strategically. Blame for so-called underuse has been cast widely, including on the need for better information, high transaction costs and risks associated with (trying to) use livestock markets, exploitation by buyers, market thinness, and even the pastoralists’ culture itself. The upshot of these varying views has been a general agreement that livestock markets represent an under-exploited resource for pastoralists and a wide variety of interventions aimed at addressing any number of perceived causes of underuse, often centered around modernization of pastoral markets. The impacts of these interventions have been mixed and none have managed to organically scale to cause broad market engagement.

This Special Issue will bring together research that improves understanding of how livestock markets function in the drylands, the complicated relationships between pastoralists and the market, and market barriers or interventions that have had important impacts on the role of livestock markets. Together, these papers will provide an evidence base for those making investments aimed at increasing the value that livestock markets offer pastoralists.

The editors invite contributions from researchers and practitioners either in research articles, reviews, or perspectives, from any region of the world where pastoralists market their livestock or livestock products.

Some topics for the Special Issue:
- Pastoralist decisions to participate in livestock marketing systems and/or its impacts
- Market and livestock dynamics (e.g., prices, quality, quantity, buyers, sellers) across
seasons, during shocks and/or in recovery
- Assessments and implications of market efficiency, vibrancy, and levels of integration
- Pastoralist livestock inventory management
- Assessment of pastoral policy landscapes
- Dairy, meat, fibre and leather processing and marketing value chain analysis
- Impacts of interventions
- Efficiency in livestock marketing
- Gender dynamics in intrahousehold decision making and its effects on livestock
outcomes
- The role of information
- Livestock markets as a source for offtake or rebuilding
- Assessments of any of the above topics in relation to shocks (e.g., drought, disease)

Important
As a Gold open access journal, all submissions are subject to publishing fees. Fee solutions are available on a case-by-case basis, including a number of Institutional Agreements. There is also a fund available to support authors based out of sub-Saharan Africa. Please contact the editorial office if you have any questions.

Please see the following pages for:
Publishing Fees
Author Guidelines

Article types and fees

This Special Issue accepts the following article types, unless otherwise specified in the Special Issue description:

• Brief Research Report
• Commentary
• Editorial
• Original Research
• Perspective
• Review

Articles that are accepted for publication by our external editors following rigorous peer review incur a publishing fee charged to Authors, institutions, or funders.

Article types

This Special Issue accepts the following article types, unless otherwise specified in the Special Issue description:

• Brief Research Report
• Commentary
• Editorial
• Original Research
• Perspective
• Review

Keywords: Livestock marketing, Dairy, Markets, Market Efficiency, Inventory Management, Modernization