Herding by Mobile Phone: Technology, Social Networks and the “Transformation” of Pastoral Herding in East Africa Bilal Butt Published online: 5 December 2014 # Springer Science+Business Media New York 2014 Abstract Over the last decade, the number of people who rely on mobile phones in sub-Saharan Africa has grown rapidly. The ubiquity of mobile phones in rural livestock communities is thought to “transform” or “revolutionize” the way different social groups interact as they manage social, political and environmental challenges to their livelihood strategies. This research among pastoralists in Kenya exam- ines the political, economic, ecological and socio-spatial con- texts in which mobile phones are used and places these contexts within pre-existing resource struggles in order to understand the prevalence of mobile phone use among pasto- ralists. Results indicate that, while the use of mobile phones for herding is widespread, the extent and efficacy of informa- tion sharing is strongly influenced by pre-existing social struggles to gain access to prohibited grazing locations. Keywords Political ecology . Grazing . Kenya . Maasai . Development . Conservation Introduction Research on the intersections between agrarian livelihood systems, heterogeneous environments and mobile technolo- gies have been concerned with two main focus areas: First, a critical examination of the cultural, demographic and spatial characteristics of adoption and diffusion of individual tech- nologies at different scales (e.g., Blumenstock and Eagle 2010; Bratton 2013; Burrell 2010; Murphy and Priebe 2011; Wesolowski et al. 2012); and second, attempts to understand the ways by which resource users deploy certain technologies to influence the trajectory of interactions between livelihood production strategies and changing environmental, social, po- litical and cultural conditions (Burrell and Anderson 2008; De Bruijn 2009). While these two approaches are linked, in this paper I address the latter, examining the various perspectives that highlight how mobile technologies have differing influ- ences on society at large, and how they intersect with the broader political economy of resource governance to produce differential socio-environmental outcomes. Social scientists seeking to understand how assemblages of emergent technologies create, modify and influence networks of socio-environmental knowledge have relied on various concepts, such as Actor-Network Theory (ANT), to analyze the production of knowledge as occurring through relational networks, where objects (e.g., people, animals, microbes) contribute equally as agents to the configurations and reconfigurations of the network itself (Goldman et al. 2011; Latour 2005; Law 1998). These studies have illuminated how the agency of people, animals, and material objects, as well as state and non-state institutions contribute to the broader poli- tics of knowledge creation, modification and application in order to suit particular institutions and advance conservation and development goals (Goldman et al. 2011; Sultana 2013). Within the development practitioner community, a parallel set of literatures has long argued that new mobile technologies allow for rapid solutions to socio-environmental problems, especially in areas where poor infrastructure has historically hampered the pursuit of development goals (The World Bank 2012). Popular media often report on how simple mobile apps or text-based messaging services cut out profit-seeking inter- mediaries, for example, allowing rural producers to access market information more directly (Ogunlesi and Busari 2012). These narratives argue that technology provides greater individual agency, which then necessarily translates to greater, positive and more uniform development efforts (Fox 2011). From this perspective technology is seen as one of the main drivers of a social group’s ability to adapt to rapidly changing B. Butt (*) University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA e-mail: bilalb@umich.edu Hum Ecol (2015) 43:1–14 DOI 10.1007/s10745-014-9710-4