Decentralisation, Rural Livelihoods and Pasture-Land Management in Post-Socialist Mongolia

Abstract

Mongolia's post-socialist transition since 1990 has included, among other changes, reforms toward democratic decentralisation. For natural resource governance, and pasture-land management in particular, decentralisation has been at best incomplete and at worst ‘empty’. It has created an institutional vacuum that herders and others have sought to fill with recourse to formal and informal, new and old arrangements. Herding households are also rapidly increasing against a background of economic hardship and vulnerability. The effects include an altered distribution of grazing pressure, with discernibly adverse impacts on the pastoral environment, and the acceleration of already rising inequality. Democratic decentralisation could help to restore environmental and social justice.