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Ruminant livestock production is among the most controversial land uses and sectors of our global food system today. It also may be the most consequential, impacting half the land on earth, supporting over one billion people directly, and contributing significant greenhouse gas emissions. This sector must be part of food systems transformation to support nature, tackle climate change, and improve human wellbeing. However, the environmental, economic, and social context and outcomes from these systems varies enormously. Silver bullet solutions or misapplication of scientific findings can lead to trade-offs and inefficiencies. We developed case studies from a range of biomes, production system types, socio-political and economic contexts around the world. We then did a comparative qualitative analysis to identify patterns in contextual factors that enable or create barriers to implementation of a range of management practices, and can be used to inform policy or other interventions. In this paper, we describe the contextual factors that influence uptake of different practices in three rangeland-based case studies which we chose to exemplify the three major production system types, and a cross-section of climatic and socio-economic settings – Eastern Africa, the Tibetan Plateau of China, and the Great Plains of the United States. We highlight that research and resulting policy to improve climate, biodiversity, and human wellbeing outcomes must be better tailored to the unique, often-changing local conditions than they have been in the past.