Last summer, the FAO published Pastoralism – Making Variability Work, a paper in its Animal Production and Health series (relayed by Inter-reseaux here). Saverio Krätli and Ilse Koehler-Rollefson discuss, in this book review, the inherent challenges of writing about pastoralists at the global scale and analyse the concept of variability as it is used in the FAO’s paper, its advantages and limits.