Ephemeral ‘communities’: spatiality and politics in rangeland interventions in Mongolia

Abstract

In recent years, the number of community-based natural resource management projects for rangeland conservation and development has grown rapidly in Mongolia. Such projects seek to develop social capital through the formation of herder groups and pasture user groups, in order to enable the coordination of complex, collective tasks needed for sustainability. Through analysis of social networks, interviews and ethnographic data from two places where such projects have been implemented, Bayanjargalan, Dundgovi, and Tariat, Arkhangai, the paper demonstrates that the spatiality of pastoral social relations is much more extensive than assumed by these projects. Furthermore, rather than being neutral technical interventions, such projects are embedded in and proliferate politics. They often bolster the informal power of wealthy herders who gain more access to pasture, while at the same time leading to tensions between different levels of government and becoming objects of struggle between Mongolia’s two dominant political parties. For all of these reasons, these efforts have tended not to build trust, and the ‘communities’ they create, in the form of herder groups and pasture user groups, have tended to be ephemeral.

Keywords:

• Mongolia
• community-based natural resource management (CBNRM)
• social networks
• politics
• spatiality
• rangelands

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to the Open Society’s Central Asia Research and Training Initiative and the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation for making this research possible. We would also like to thank the many herders whom we interviewed over the course of this research, and the reviewers for their helpful comments. All errors are our own.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹The socialist collectives in many cases used the khot ail – the smallest customary institution for assistance and labor sharing in herding – as an economic unit, though using a new name, surri (Humphrey 1978). During socialist times, surri or khot ail members shared the labor of herding state-owned livestock equally and moved together year round. However, decollectivization and privatization of livestock have ended year-round collective movement, and households are now camped together to form khot ail seasonally or only during wintertime. In our study sites, the term khot ail is used in Tariat but not in Bayanjargalan. In the mountainous Khangai region where Tariat is located, herders live relatively close together and grasses are more abundant. Khot ail there consist of 3–5 households. In the sparsely vegetated and populated Gobi region, however, they are called saakhalt and there are only 1–2 households per camp. As Murphy (2015, 403) notes, the term can also refer to a single household unit, and the khot ail is not always a site of egalitarian cooperation.

²Its formal translation of khui khamtlag is not familiar to most Mongolians. Projects that first introduced CBNRM to Mongolia in the 1990s in the context of conservation and environmental protection often used oron nutgin irged or nutgin irged, literally ‘citizens living in a particular place’, while other projects used khamtlag, meaning a collective or band.

³We use ‘pasture’ and ‘rangeland’ somewhat interchangeably insofar as they have no distinction in Mongolian. In English, ‘rangeland’ tends to be used in reference to conservation projects, and ‘pastoral’ to development or livelihood projects.

⁴See also Fernandez-Gimenez (1999) on absentee herd-owners for a different example of beyond-local territory spatiality.

⁵The 15 herders whose networks were analyzed are named by the letter assigned in our network analysis; non-egocentric analysis herders are given pseudonyms.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the OSI Assistance Foundation's CARTI-J project ‘Perceived environmental change in Mongolia: Herders becoming environmental subjects’ and the Swiss Confederation Project ‘Socio-cultural dimensions of change & development in the Mongolian pastoral economy’ [grant number 8109444].

Notes on contributors

Byambabaatar Ichinkhorloo

Byambabaatar Ichinkhorloo is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Anthropology and Archeology, National University of Mongolia, where he conducts research on pastoralism, political ecology, development interventions and natural resource management. He has published articles on resilience to livestock loss from dzud and on the impact of meat reserves on the meat market in Mongolia. In addition to his scholarly work, he has worked for more than 15 years as a research consultant in the international development sector in Mongolia. Email: [email protected]

Emily T. Yeh

Emily T. Yeh is professor and chair of the Department of Geography, University of Colorado Boulder. She has conducted research on nature–society relations, primarily in Tibetan parts of the People's Republic of China, including conflicts over access to natural resources, the relationship between ideologies of nature and nation, the political ecology of pastoral environment and development policies, and emerging environmental subjectivities. She is the author of Taming Tibet: landscape transformation and the gift of Chinese development (2013), and co-editor of Mapping Shangrila: contested landscapes in the Sino-Tibetan borderlands (2014) and Rural politics in contemporary China, a collection of the Journal of Peasant Studies.