Sustaining the Steppes: A Geographical History of Pastoral Land Use in Mongolia^*

* This research was supported by grants from the International Research and Exchanges Board, the National Geographic Society, the University of California, and a National Science Foundation graduate fellowship. B. Bat‐buyan of the Mongolian Academy of Science's Institute for Geoecology and the Center for Nomadic Pastoralism Studies provided valuable research assistance. I am grateful to Jeremy Swift and three anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments.

Abstract

Recent shifts in Mongolia's politics and economy have changed pastoral land‐use patterns and charged debate over how pasturelands are allocated and regulated in a market economy. Absent has been any detailed understanding of the historical geography of pastoral tenure and land‐use patterns in Mongolia prior to the socialist era and the collectivization of livestock husbandry. An overview and case study of changing tenures and land‐use patterns suggests that in prerevolutionary Mongolia wealth and poverty determined herders' mobility and access to pasture resources; no less is true today. Historical data also reveal dual formal and informal regulatory institutions extant in the past that coordinated patterns of seasonal movement. This amounted to an unofficial tenure system and has contributed to Mongolia's legacy of ecologically and socially sustainable pastoralism.

• land tenure
• land use
• Mongolia
• nomads
• pastoralism

Additional information

Notes on contributors

María E. Fernández‐giménez

Dr. FernÁndez‐GimÉnez is an assistant professor of renewable natural resources at the University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona 85721–0043.