Abstract
Land use in post-1990 Mongolia has been in constant flux, often reacting to environmental, demographic, economic, political, and legal pressures. This chapter will attempt to trace the changes in land use and examine ways in which herders participate in decisions regarding land use issues in Mongolia’s countryside. Land use in post-1990 Mongolia cannot be summarized easily: variation in practice belies the notion that laws enacted by Mongolia’s Ikh Khural (parliament) will lead to uniformity and fairness across the landscape. This chapter will also place Mongolia in a comparative context, examining policies governing herders in the pastoral zones of the People’s Republic of China and Kazakhstan. The role of agriculture in Mongolian history and agriculture’s future in Mongolia are important issues that will be addressed in chapter 6.
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Notes
Melvyn C. Goldstein and Cynthia M. Beall, The Changing World of Mongolia’s Nomads (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1994), 128.
See David Sneath, “Land Use, the Environment and Development in Post-Socialist Mongolia,” Oxford Development Studies 31, no. 4 (December 2003): 455, n. 7.
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Mearns, “Decentralisation,” 140; see also the example in Maria E. Fernandez-Gimenez, “Spatial and Social Boundaries and the Paradox of Pastoral Land Tenure: A Case Study from Postsocialist Mongolia,” Human Ecology: An Interdisciplinary Journal 30, no. 1 (March 2002): 67, n. 3.
Martha Avery, Women of Mongolia (Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 1996), 112.
See Garrett Hardin, “The Tragedy of the Commons,” Science 162 (1968): 1243–1248.
For an example of recent scholarship, see Oran R. Young, “Land Use, Environmental Change, and Sustainable Development: The Role of Institutional Diagnostics,” International Journal of the Commons 5, no. 1 (February 2011): 66–85;
for the key work in this field, see Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
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John Perkins, To the Ends of the Earth: Four Expeditions to the Arctic, the Congo, the Gobi, and Siberia (New York: Pantheon Books, 1981), 92.
Walther Heissig, Religions of Mongolia, trans. Geoffrey Samuel (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1980), 104.
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See Dennis Ojima and Togtohyn Chuluun, “Policy Changes in Mongolia: Implications for Land Use and Landscapes,” in Fragmentation in Semi-Arid and Arid Landscapes: Consequences for Human and Natural Systems, ed. K. A. Galvin, R. S. Reid, R. H. Behnke, Jr., and N. T. Hobbs (Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Springer, 2010), 187–188.
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Maria E. Fernandez-Gimenez, “Spatial and Social Boundaries and the Paradox of Pastoral Land Tenure: A Case Study from Postsocialist Mongolia,” Human Ecology: An Interdisciplinary Journal 30, no. 1 (March 2002): 57.
See David Sneath, “Property Regimes and Sociotechnical Systems: Rights over Land in Mongolia’s ‘Age of the Market,’” in Property in Question: Value Transformation in the Global Economy, eds. Katherine Verdery and Caroline Humphrey (New York: Berg, 2004), 164–165.
See Robin Mearns, “Decentralisation, Rural Livelihoods and Pasture-Management in Post-Socialist Mongolia,” European Journal of Development Research 16, no. 1 (Spring 2004): 142–144.
See Maria E. Fernandez-Gimenez and B. Batbuyan, “Law and Disorder: Local Implementation of Mongolia’s Land Law, “Development and Change 35, no. 1 (January 2004): 154.
Mukhamet Shayakhmetov, The Silent Steppe: The Memoir of a Kazakh Nomad under Stalin, trans. from the Russian by Jan Butler (New York: The Rookery Press, 2007), 4.
Iliya I. Alimaev, Roy H. Behnke, Jr., “Ideology, Land Tenure and Livestock Mobility in Kazakhstan,” in Fragmentation in Semi-Arid and Arid Landscapes: Consequences for Human and Natural Systems, ed. K. A. Galvin, R. S. Reid, R. H. Behnke, Jr. and N. T. Hobbs (Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Springer, 2010), 155–156.
See Alimaev, aa and Behnke, aa, “Ideology, Land Tenure and Livestock Mobility,” 157; see also Martha Brill Olcott, The Kazakhs (Stanford, CA: Stanford University, Hoover Institution Press, 1987), 98.
Sarah Robinson, Peter Finke, and Bettina Hamann, “The Impacts of De-Collectivization on Kazak Pastoralists. Case Studies from Kazakstan, Mongolia and the People’s Republic of China,” Journal of Central Asian Studies 4, no. 2 (Spring/Summer 2000): 5–6f.
David Sneath, “Land Use, the Environment and Development in Post-Socialist Mongolia,” Oxford Development Studies 31, no. 4 (December 2003): 442.
See the summary of the conference discussions in The Kazakhstan Livestock Sector in Transition to a Free Market, eds. Anatoly Khazanov, Vitaly Naumkin, Kenneth Shapiro, and David Tomas (Moscow: Russian Center for Strategic Research and International Studies, 1999), 295–301. I am indebted to Professor Khazanov for giving me a copy of this volume.
See Y. Kawabata et al., “Uranium and Thorium Isotopes from Kazakhstan,” Journal of Radioanalytical and Nuclear Chemistry 278, no. 2 (2008): 459–462.
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© 2012 Elizabeth Endicott
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Endicott, E. (2012). Post-1990 developments: Who determines Land Use in the Era of the Free Market?. In: A History of Land Use in Mongolia. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137269669_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137269669_5
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