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Mongolia’s new resource politics, central to the country’s geopolitical considerations and ambitions in the twenty-first century, must be understood in relation to their complex, multi-scalar socio-cultural, historical and environmental dimensions. This paper draws on the author’s participatory research activities with key informants in Ulaanbaatar and amongst rural herding communities to illuminate key aspects, contexts and implications of the new resource politics. Specifically, the paper presents an empirically informed analysis of pertinent social and institutional forms, environmental and cultural values and aspects of resource governance, with particular reference to land issues, pastoralism, mining and resistance. Conceptually, it draws on recent work, especially in geography and political ecology, on activism, conservation and particularly on emerging discourses and framings of natural resources as ‘ecosystem services’. Through attention to these concepts, it highlights contested dimensions of environmental values and valuation, of critical contemporary importance in Mongolia’s new resource politics.
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Agrawal A. Common property institutions and sustainable governance of resources World Development 2001 29 1649 72
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After Bebbington (2012).
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Bebbington (2013) uses the term ‘landscapes of meaning’ to refer to ‘cultural meaning in the form of territory’ for local indigenous populations, thus moving beyond concerns with land ownership per se, and indicating concepts of value that elude economic valuation techniques.
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From the late 1950s until the early 1990s, herders in Mongolia’s rural areas were members of Soviet-inspired, state-run collectives (negdel). Amongst their other roles in regulating herders’ livelihoods and labour, negdel were responsible for conferring land rights on constituent herder divisions (e.g. brigades) and for managing land use in their territories, including herders’ movement between seasonal pastures. The degree to which aspects of negdel-era land use and land rights reflected pre collective ‘traditional’ or ‘customary’ norms is contested and geographically variable, albeit with general reductions in herders’ mobility linked to changes in administrative boundaries in the negdel period (Mearns 1996; Upton 2009). Pastureland remained in state ownership during these changes and to the present day, although the post-decollectivisation era has been marked by (ongoing) debates over appropriate forms of land rights and tenure.
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Search for other papers by Caroline Upton in
Current site
Google Scholar
PubMed
Mongolia’s new resource politics, central to the country’s geopolitical considerations and ambitions in the twenty-first century, must be understood in relation to their complex, multi-scalar socio-cultural, historical and environmental dimensions. This paper draws on the author’s participatory research activities with key informants in Ulaanbaatar and amongst rural herding communities to illuminate key aspects, contexts and implications of the new resource politics. Specifically, the paper presents an empirically informed analysis of pertinent social and institutional forms, environmental and cultural values and aspects of resource governance, with particular reference to land issues, pastoralism, mining and resistance. Conceptually, it draws on recent work, especially in geography and political ecology, on activism, conservation and particularly on emerging discourses and framings of natural resources as ‘ecosystem services’. Through attention to these concepts, it highlights contested dimensions of environmental values and valuation, of critical contemporary importance in Mongolia’s new resource politics.
| All Time | Past Year | Past 30 Days | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Abstract Views | 1002 | 76 | 14 |
| Full Text Views | 230 | 13 | 2 |
| PDF Views & Downloads | 81 | 16 | 5 |