Mongolian pastures
Herders moved between seasonal pastures for centuries by coordinating who went where and when. After 1991 the coordination was privatised away, and the first bad winters killed roughly a third of the national herd.
- Place
- Mongolian steppe, MN
- Founded
- 13th century
- Ended
- 1991–1995
- Duration
- c. 795 years
What is held
Seasonal pasture, and the things that make pasture usable — winter shelters, wells, springs, and the reserve grazing kept back for an emergency.
Who is in
Membership of a khot ail, a camp group of a few households, usually kin, with customary claim to particular seasonal camps. Under the collective, membership of the negdel and its brigade.
Who decides
The camp group for day-to-day movement; above it the district. Under the collective (from the late 1950s to 1991) the brigade organised movement and held the trucks that made a long move possible at all.
How the rules are made
Custom, then the collective's plan, then — after 1991 — the Land Law, which allocated possession of winter camps to individual households and left summer pasture open to everyone. That asymmetry is the whole mechanism of the failure.
How cheating is caught
The camp group watched its own pastures, because its own animals ate them. After decollectivisation there was nobody whose job that was, and no transport to reach the reserve pasture even once someone noticed.
The sanction ladder
No ladder. Two different absences, and this page should not merge them. After 1991 no institution held authority to sanction over-use of summer pasture — that is a finding about the collapse, and it is the mechanism. What the CUSTOMARY ladder was before then is simply not established in this draft — that is a gap in the research, and HC-009 is where it gets filled.
Mongolian pastures has no recorded sanction ladder.
What happens in a bad year
The dzud: a dry summer followed by a winter that seals the grass under ice. The customary answer was otor — moving the herd long distances to reserve pasture. After 1991 the trucks, the coordination and the reserve areas had all gone. The dzuds of 1999–2002 killed roughly a third of the national herd.
Notes on the account
Put this page beside Newfoundland and the pair does the work neither does alone. The cod failed after the state took the fishery over. The pastures failed after the state let them go. If a reader leaves with one conclusion from this gallery, it should not be that public management works or that private ownership works — it should be that the question is badly posed, and that what matters is whether somebody with standing is coordinating who takes what, when.
The specific mechanism is worth stating plainly. Privatisation did not divide the steppe. It divided the winter camps — the fixed, improvable, defensible part — and left the summer pasture, which is the part that needs coordinating, open to all. Households now had a reason to stay near their own winter camp and no way to organise the long seasonal moves that had kept any one area from being grazed out. Herd numbers rose. Movement fell. Then the weather arrived.
The ladder on this page is empty, and the emptiness is the finding.
What is not settled in this draft
The founding date is the weakest claim here by a wide margin: pastoral governance on this steppe is much older than the century given, and the century given is the period from which it is well described rather than a beginning. The relative weight of decollectivisation against drought, market change and migration to the cities is exactly what HC-009 is asked to check, and this draft is likely to have overstated the first.
Sources
- The Role of Mongolian Nomadic Pastoralists' Ecological Knowledge in Rangeland Management — María E. Fernández-Giménez, Ecological Applications 10(5), 2000.
- Sustaining the Steppes: A Geographical History of Pastoral Land Use in Mongolia — María E. Fernández-Giménez, Geographical Review 89(3), 1999.