The Nature’s Contribution to People (NCP) framework builds on the Ecosystem Services (ES) concept and aims to incorporate social sciences more inclusively into economic and ecological aspects of ES. Given the emphasis of NCP around social issues, it is our hypothesis that NCP framework is well positioned to analyse complex socio-ecological systems (SES) where human-nature interactions are heavily linked, such as pastoral systems. In this article, a qualitative comparative analysis was conducted to explore trends throughout the literature on pastoral systems and the viability of the NCP framework to analyse pastoral systems as a SES with strong human-nature interactions. We found that the NCP framework allows for an intuitive translation from ES. Our results show that the NCP Habitat creation and maintenance, Food and feed, and Supporting identities are the most connected to pastoral systems in the scientific literature. Given the emphasis of the NCP framework on non-material aspects of human-nature systems and the ease with which it can be applied to the literature, we suggest that the NCP framework can be complementary to the ES framework to allow for a more complete analysis of SES with strong human-nature connections.