Pastoralism and Common Pool Resources

Rangeland co-management, property rights and access in Mongolia

Sandagsuren Undargaa

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138847484
• eBook ISBN: 9781317537922
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Law
• Subtopic: Environmental Law
• Index: Law

The grazing of animals on common land and associated property rights were the original basis of the concept of "the tragedy of the commons". Drawing on the classic work of Elinor Ostrom and the readings of political ecology, this book questions the application of exclusive property rights to mobile pastoralism and rangeland resource governance. It argues that this approach inadequately represents property relations in the context of Mongolian pastoralism.

The author presents an in-depth exploration and analysis of mobile pastoral production and resource management in Mongolia. The country is widely considered to be a prime example of successful and resilient common pool resource management, but now faces a dilemma as policy advocates attempt to adjust historical pastoralism to a modern property regime framework.

The book strengthens understanding of the complex and multilateral considerations involved in natural resource governance and management in a mobile pastoralist context. It considers the implications for common pool resource management and pastoral societies in Africa, Russia and China and includes recommendations for formulating national policy.

1
Mobile pastoralism, access and policy

I have not tried [getting/applying for a campsite] yet. It seems strange neither to get it or not to try for it [applying for one]. We may need to get [legal possession of campsite] one. However, if we get one, then I may need to argue with someone to protect it [campsite and pasture around it] from others. If I do not argue, then others would come and use it. Also, if there is no grass or water, then we have to leave for elsewhere. So, there are troubles with it [legal possession of a campsite] …

A poor migrant herder in HBU bag¹

Introducing the challenges of common pool resource management in Mongolia

Upon learning of the large territory (1,564,116 sq km)² that Mongolia has for its comparatively small population of 2,992,908 (July 2015 est.),³ many foreigners and even some Mongolians are often startled. The need for larger territory, even at the smallest rural administrative level, may have much to do with Mongolians’ predominant culture of mobile pastoralism. Local actors, including state-based agencies and herders, have always vied for maintaining as large a territory as possible for obtaining benefits from rangeland. That is why the state territorial administration has become ever more significant for managing pastoral people and production. Since 1990, Mongolia has shifted its economic policy from a centrally planned to a market economy. This policy transition has led to dramatic modifications in mobile pastoralism and environmental management practices. This has resulted in a decline of formal pastoral institutions and possibly in customary land use practices. This decline has led to livestock overgrazing and increasing disputes over natural resource use among various actors (herders, local and national level officials from different jurisdictions) involved in resource management. These outcomes have partially contributed to rangeland degradation in Mongolia. A majority of national and international advocates and scholars have identified the underlying problem as “open access” or an absence of or poorly defined property rights to pastureland ( Fernandez-Gimenez and Batbuyan, 2004; Fernandez-Gimenez et al., 2008; Griffin, 2003; Ickowitz, 2003; Mearns, 2004a, 2004b). They suggest that the collapse of the former negdel collective institution has led to an absence of legal mechanisms to control the herders’ access to pastoral resources. As a consequence of such assessments, national and international development agencies have attempted to strengthen local pastoral institutions and reform pastureland management by implementing policy initiatives based on property rights and regimes, collective action and conservation-oriented community-based natural resource management (CBNRM) (Griffin, 2003; Mearns, 2004b; Upton, 2008). These policy approaches focus on introducing exclusive property rights in order to define key actors to control access to pastureland. However, these policy approaches have failed to solve the problems in pastureland management. Hitherto, pastureland management has been a contested issue in rural and environmental development. This is because mobile pastoralism and its pastoral food production depend upon exploiting common pool resources (CPR) such as rangeland, water and forests. CPR is a system of resources in which it is hard to pursue exclusion and management is costly, because the resources are large and migratory. The users’ exploitation of the resources subtracts from the availability of the same resources to others, because they are shared among many actors (Feeny et al., 1990; Ostrom et al., 1999). The failure of current land management policies is based on a poor understanding of the rangeland ecosystem and the pastoral production (Miller and Sheehy, 2008, p. 191). This poor understanding is in fact rooted in questionable global perceptions of mobile pastoralism as an economically inefficient and primitive production system that causes overgrazing (Hardin, 1968; Khazanov, 1994; Sneath, 2007). As a result, sedentary colonial and modern development policies have aimed at shifting this production system to agrarianism, primarily seeking to make use of natural resources more effectively in economic terms and avoid environmental degradation (Hardin, 1968; Khazanov, 1994).

In the twentieth–twenty-first century, this negative attitude towards pastoralism has been reflected in two major policies adopted by the governments of post-socialist and post-colonial countries. First, the state nationalized the pastoral production system towards developing intensive production and took control over pastureland management in larger pastoral societies in Africa and Inner Asia. When the centralized economy failed, state control of production systems weakened. Second, some international development advocates viewed the role of the market as positive for development, but sometimes the market is constrained by the lack of capacity in governments of the developing countries. Thus, from 1970 to 1990, the World Bank introduced its Structural Adjustment Program (SAP) with the aim of shifting the economy of indebted countries from a state-controlled to a market-based economy (Razavi, 2003; Sneath, 2004). The aim of the SAP was to “ ‘emancipate’ the economy from the political structure” and allow its own nature to imbue through private property and the market (Sneath, 2003, p. 442). In the agricultural sector, landholding systems have been conventionally seen as static and inflexible in the face of changing economic conditions, because traditional community-based land tenure is considered unable to respond to these changes (Yngstrom, 2002). Thus, the World Bank also introduced land reform to achieve economic growth through increasing efficiency in agricultural land management. The World Bank introduced land titling by registering and certifying existing informal or formal rights (Griffin 1995) and advocated the titling of both agrarian and pastoral land managed under a state property regime. The interest in titling initially derived from a concern that smallholders, who are the key players of agricultural growth, did not have sufficient access to and control over land. Now, under land reform, secure tenure was to be guaranteed to individuals and “household” units through land entitlement. This interest in titling gradually became tied to the economic policy of privatization of state properties, especially of land rights, in order to restructure economic processes (Yngstrom, 2002). Rural land would be privatized as a way to restore agricultural export growth and improve rural incomes and livelihoods (Razavi, 2003). This privatization was expected to trigger the development of a market for land, and consequently provide collateral for credit and promote economic efficiency by facilitating the transfer of land to those who would make the best use of the land. It was argued that this would eventually lead to increased productivity and better land stewardship (Fernandez-Gimenez and Batbuyan, 2004; Griffin, 1995; Razavi, 2003; Yngstrom, 2002).

Ironically, in many cases these policies themselves resulted in environmental degradation;⁴ changed the land use practices and limited the value of the land to cash income due to the commoditization of the land or land rights; and contributed to a growing disparity between rich and poor and exacerbated the increasing conflict between state, local communities and individual households (Devereux, 1996; Izumi, 1999). Following the commoditization of natural resources, the very allocation of rights has also become commercialized and has attracted the attention of different, non-primary users; this is seen, for example, in land grabbing by political elites, and has resulted in the appropriation of village land and resources by the state. Locally, in many cases male community leaders and household heads, who are registered for land entitlement, have gained control over a resource (Meinzen-Dick et al., 1997). More recently a growing number of scholarly works have recognized the significance of pastoralism as it provides a secure livelihood that is adjusted to the existing environmental conditions (Humphrey and Sneath, 1999; Miller and Sheehy, 2008). Since the survival of rural livelihoods hinges on natural resources in the pastoral context, natural resource management has been considered alongside agriculture as a way to prevent environmental degradation/desertification caused by the “mismanagement of pastoral lands” and improve environmental stewardship (Bruce and Mearns, 2002; Fratkin, 1997). Thus, some international development agencies have shifted their policy from state control or a market-based policy approach to a CBNRM approach (Agrawal and Gibson, 1999, Fratkin and Mearns, 2003).

The development discourse referred to here is mainly based on narratives derived from a variety of theories on property right and regimes, community, and self-governing institutional arrangements, among others. In Mongolia, these development policy discourses led, first, to land reform (Korsun and Murrel, 1995; Nixson and Walters, 2006) regarding that herders’ use of pastureland would lead to overuse (Hardin, 1968). Also, based on the notion of a state property regime, the government put in place a territorial strategy for natural resource management that expanded the protected areas system in Mongolia (Bedunah and Schmidt, 2004). Second, following the prevailing property regimes approach, Mongolian land tenure was defined as (failed) overlapping or nested state and customary management (Mearns, 2004b; Fernandez-Gimenez and Batbuyan, 2004), or de jure state or de facto common property (Upton, 2005, p. 586) or even traditional open access commons (Griffin, 2003, p. 67; Ickowitz, 2003, pp. 96, 97). Consequently, international development agencies advocated policies based on the CBNRM approach and prioritized formalizing herders’ property rights by engineering nested community institutions under the arrangement of autonomous herder groups (Mearns, 2004b; Schmidt, 2004; SDC, 2010). This reflected the CPR approach of improving/mending historical local institutions or crafting new self-governing institutions (Agrawal, 2001; Agrawal and Ostrom, 2001; Ostrom et al., 1999). For this, national policy advocates re-defined local community and/or the rural socio-economic unit using the Mongolian concept of neg nutag usniihan (people of the same neighborhood, who share the same resources).⁵ Engineering such socio-economic units, which are smaller than the existing territorial administrative units, has a broader agenda of supporting extensive and intensive livestock husbandry and eventual village-based sedentarization, and developing alternative livelihoods toward strengthening community collective action and adaptation to changing climatic conditions (Bazargur, 1998; SDC, 2010).

However, there is a gap in the literature in (a) explaining the ways in which these policy reforms have failed and contributed to altering pastoral production and pastureland management, and (b) why the theoretical approaches which embed these policies fail to explain the CPR dilemma in Mongolia. This book argues that key problems faced by policy are related to market-based land management approaches and CPR theory specifying property rights to natural resources (Undargaa and McCarthy, 2016). Market-based management attempts to use notions of exclusive individual rights. The CPR approach allows for more sophisticated approaches: building on the notion of a bundle of rights, these approaches privilege community-based natural resource management and co-management (Feeny et al., 1990; Meinzen-Dick et al., 2004). However, both approaches face several particular shortcomings. First, policies based on these theories tend to be prescriptive in nature: both attempts to present universalizing theories of property rights. As applied in Mongolia they are normative, suggesting how things ought to be organized, while inadequately providing a lens for describing how things are, or explaining the process of why things came to be. Second, the application of these property approaches raises questions of equity and legitimacy. Implementation of these approaches increases the complexity of property institutions, leading to further fuzziness. Third, they neglect the way actors make use of wider legal and extra-legal mechanisms beyond property rights to derive benefits from pastoral production. Fourth, they are built on an inadequate understanding of resource governance. Together these approaches via CPR in terms of primary production resource compartmentalize its management, whilst neglecting the management of other production components, which equally influence resource governance. Policy advocates applying such approaches readily misread how pastoralist institutions have historically adjusted their integrated framework of management of the three components (livestock, labor and land) of production to a continuum of equilibrium and disequilibrium conditions. Finally, based on assumptions embedded in CPR property regimes theory, analysts have misread the Mongolian landscape – constructing a problem of open access, which is misleading. In essence, these theoretical approaches tend to lack the conceptual acuity required to understand the dynamic contexts found in Mongolian Pastoralism. They present a “fixed” menu of property mechanisms for defining access and use of property rights and for improving management (Undargaa and McCarthy, 2016).

Mongolian Pastoralism cannot be distilled into the fixed categories of property theory. Most herders continue to rely on customary independent pastoral production and mobility as they lack access to resources to benefit from any other rural development alternatives. Policy initiatives based on these concepts are inadequate in regulating herders’ complex patterns of access to pastureland during unstable market and weather conditions. As we will see later, policy makers faced difficultie...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Acknowledgments
• Acronyms and abbreviations
• 1 Mobile pastoralism, access and policy
• 2 Understanding common pool resource and rangeland management
• 3 Mobile pastoralism and the pre-collective period (c.1206–c.1921)
• 4 Mobile pastoralism and the collectivization period (1921–1991)
• 5 Pastoral production and pastureland management during transition to a market economy
• 6 Land reform in pastureland management
• 7 Community-based natural resource management
• 8 State territorial strategy for natural resource governance and pastoral production
• 9 Conclusion
• Glossary
• Index