Herders and hazards: covariate dzud risk and the cost of risk management strategies in a Mongolian subdistrict

Ariell Ahearn

doi:10.1007/s11069-017-3128-4

Abstract

Studies of mobile pastoralist livelihoods have shown that a variety of socio-technical practices have been developed to achieve reliable outputs from livestock in variable arid and semi-arid environments. This paper builds upon the concept of pastoralists as high-reliability seekers rather than risk-averse and makes a case for understanding Mongolian herders as well adapted to livestock production in highly variable climatic conditions within a certain threshold of risk and uncertainty. This system fails, however, during instances of high uncertainty and covariate risk such as in cases of the natural hazard dzud, which requires individual households to make significant cash investments in risk management. It forwards the idea that investing in local government—soum and bag level—administrative capacity and infrastructure is needed to build system resilience to covariate risk. Based on ethnographic research in rural Bayankhongor, this paper interrogates how dzud interfaces with socio-economic factors amongst pastoralists in central west Mongolia.

Highlights

It is said that there are two kinds of dzud
The following section focuses on the role of local government in the pastoralist economy and household winter preparations in order to elucidate the role of soum governments in dzud risk management
Because every place is possessed by somebody”. These dynamics indicate that the potential damages of a covariate natural hazard such as dzud, which poses a significant risk of livestock loss to households regardless of wealth differentials (Middleton et al 2015), are exacerbated or buffered by the management capability of county-level governance institutions

Summary

Introduction

It is said that there are two kinds of dzud. In the black dzud, there is no snow. In the context of dzud, which is characterized by the inability of livestock to access pasture, what practices and forms of governance enable pastoralists to manage covariate environmental risks?

Results

Conclusion