Research experience in southern Africa is used to reflect on key determinants of pastoral futures and how they might need to be addressed. The paper begins with a brief review of what we mean by marginality. A set of observations on key issues defining the option sets for pastoralism in the future is then presented. The first of these is that only a small number of structures or processes actually control the behaviour of social-ecological systems such as pastoralist systems. A second observation is that the future is so uncertain that there is a need to learn to design for robustness across plausible futures. Coupled to this is the observation that a reliable understanding of how we might manage adaptive capacity in pastoral people and communities is needed. Lastly it is suggested that a vital frontier in research is the set of relationships between cognition, emotions and behaviour at the scales of the individual and society