Property 'owners' without rights? Exploring property relations and access in the Herlen Bayan-Ulaan reserve pasture area of Mongolia

Abstract

Many analysts consider that Land degradation in Mongolia is in part the result of overgrazing. Many have argued that this is due to the absence of property rights or the inability of formal pastoral institutions to regulate access to pastureland as common pool resources (CPR). Consequently, both national and international development agencies have attempted to strengthen local pastoral institutions by implementing policies that are based on market-based land reform and community-based natural resource management (CBNRM) derived from popular theoretical approaches to analyze problems with CPR management. To date, there has been limited research on how these policy reforms have contributed to altering local pastoral resource management and why these theoretical approaches have failed to explain the CPR dilemma in Mongolia. This research seeks to understand why policies based on these approaches have largely struggled to adjust historical pastoralism within the existing framework of the property regimes approach and define property rights to pastoral resources. This thesis examines why herders are changing how they access seasonal pasture and how this change affects pastoral land management. It thereby investigates why new approaches have proven incompatible with local means of regulating pastoral resources (pasture and water). This qualitative study applies an access approach to understand different mechanisms, which are beyond exclusive property rights and which are involved in local actors' access to pastoral resources. Based on twelve months of field research and the study of archival and policy documents in the Herlen Bayan-Ulaan, the oldest State Reserve Pasture Area, I argue that improvements to pastureland management in Mongolia cannot be achieved simply through the application of western approaches to property rights and conservation and land-based policies without considering the significance of historically integrated production management. The HBU case reveals that the property regime approach is inadequate to explain the property relations of pastoralism in Mongolia. This analytical inadequacy led to a compartmentalized approach to managing key components (livestock, labour and land) of the integrated pastoral production management. This resulted in blocking herders' seasonal movements that are necessary for maintaining their ulamjlalt pastoral production. These analytical failures contributed to difficulties in adjusting historical pastoralism and problematic approaches to controlling access in the pastoral context. My thesis is that, by putting property in its place in the larger socio-political and ecological context, policy initiatives can strengthen historically integrated property relations and long-established social patterns, which are embedded in mainstream forms of ulamjlalt pastoral production management that function within the boundaries of the state territorial administrative units.