Rangeland Governance in a Suburban Area of Post-Socialist Mongolia

Abstract

"The way in which to ensure compatibility between development and environment preservation is one of the most crucial issues for pastoral societies. In suburban areas of the capital and secondary cities of Mongolia, the influx of herders who have migrated in search of a better life after Mongolia transitioned from a socialist to a market economy in the early 1990s, has caused problems in rangelands such as pasture degradation by overgrazing and shortages of water and forest resources. To address this problem, the 'Peri-Urban Rangeland Project' was launched in 2008 by the Mongolian government with the help of funding from the U.S. The key objective of this project was to determine a sustainable environmental and economic model for the pastoral economy by changing the extensive, nomadic pastoral economy into an intensive, sedentary one.However, the specific objective of the project, which involves admitting a small number of herders to use land exclusively forlong periods, differsfrom Mongolia's tradition of open access pasture use that enables co-management of multiple, overlapping, and contingent resources. For example, in Orkhon district, a suburban area in Bulgan province, Mongolia, which is one ofthe project sites, many herdergroups have already signed pasture land use contracts for fifteen years, and this has generated a new problem that these plots overlap with other herders' seasonal campsites and public meadows. In this presentation, I will discuss how the introduction of settled and semi-settled herding impacts rangeland use and management in suburban areas of Mongolia based on the case of Peri-Urban Rangeland Project."