Critical factors enabling sustainable rangeland management in Mongolia

Highlights

• Factors affecting sustainable management of rangeland by user groups in Mongolia are examined.

• Model specification is based on Agrawal's user-based resource governance framework.

• Data collected in 2010 among 330 herding households, belonging to 11 Pasture User Groups, are used for the empirical analysis.

• We find that well-defined rangeland boundaries are key in supporting rangeland quality.

• Inequality in herd sizes within a PUG negatively affects rangeland quality.

Introduction

Common pool resources, such as forests, aquatic resources and rangelands, contribute significantly to rural livelihoods in many parts of the world (Fernandez-Gimenez, 1999, Fernandez-Gimenez, 2002; Meinzen-Dick & Mwangi, 2006; Mwangi & Markelova, 2009). Although humans have used rangelands for consumptive and non-consumptive purposes for centuries, it was only in the early 1900s that researchers first began to study problems associated with sustainable management of rangelands. In this context, sustainable management of rangeland refers to “the manipulation of rangeland components to obtain the optimum combination of goods and services for society on a sustained basis” (Holechek, Pieper, & Herbel, 2001).

Economic theory and observed practice across the world suggest that a variety of common pool resources (forests, rangeland, fisheries, water, air) are threatened by open access, which leads to a dissipation of the resource rents by overuse (Gordon, 1954). In economic terms, they are rival and non-excludable goods. While full privatisation is one way of eliminating open access (Hardin, 1968), it is often not feasible, and particularly not in the case of the Mongolian rangeland where mobility of animals both within and across years is required (Amgalan et al., 2010). Livestock grazing on rangeland in Mongolia can be considered a typical case of “resources that are highly mobile over large expanses of territory, or of those, such as irrigation water, which require a collective infrastructure to be exploited. In these peculiar circumstances, collective regulation under the common property regime is the only way to avoid the inefficient management and/or the degradation of the resource under conditions of open access” (Baland & Platteau, 2003: p.138).

Sustainable rangeland management has received considerable attention among common pool resource scientists and scholars during the last two decades (Baland & Platteau, 2003; Fratkin & Mearns, 2003; Ho & Azadi, 2010; Mau & Chantsallkham, 2006; Mearns, 2004; Mwangi, 2007; Ykhanbai et al., 2011). Fratkin (1997) reviewed governance and development issues of pastoralism in different countries including Maasai pastoralists in East Africa, and pastoralists in India, Mongolia and China, and argued that the future of pastoralist populations is far from certain. Pastoral practices, including the tendency of individual herders to maximise their herds, coupled with increasing number of herders, are viewed as major factors promoting desertification. In Western China, rising livestock prices have contributed to a rapid increase in the number of livestock and a sharp decline in the available rangeland area per livestock unit, while in Northern China, rangeland degradation is caused by changing livestock demography, mushrooming permanent grazing encampments, year-round grazing, and an almost entirely new disaster preparation and response method (Cao, Yeh, Holden, Qin, & Ren, 2013).

Mongolia is a country where almost 80% of territory consists of rangeland; it ranks first in the world in terms of its share of rangelands. Rangeland is the basic natural resource of the Mongolian agricultural sector, which accounts for 18.8% of the GDP of the country (NSO, 2011). The rapid rise of livestock numbers during the last two decades is favourable for the herding population and also benefits other sectors that use livestock as an input. However, the number of livestock has risen beyond a critical level in terms of the ecological potential of the rangeland in Mongolia (Erdenetuya, 2006). The open access system combined with rapidly rising livestock numbers has resulted in significant deterioration of rangeland; the institutions governing the herding system are therefore no longer considered as being suitable (Amgalan et al., 2010). Novel natural resource management institutions have been introduced in Mongolia since 1999. Thus, Mongolia has become a de facto testing ground for community-based rangeland management, with the establishment of herders' self-help groups facilitated by different donor- and NGO-sponsored programs (Mau & Chantsallkham, 2006). Donor agencies have been using two main approaches to the introduction of community-based rangeland management in Mongolia (GGPEMP and MSRM 2010). These are: i) a territorial approach to rangeland management, where all traditional users of a certain territory are organised in Pasture User Groups (PUGs), ii) the formation of voluntary herder groups, which are organised primarily on the basis of a combination of kinships, shared use of key resources and common interest for joint activities. Little is known, however, about the impact of these community-based management institutions on the quality of rangeland.

The objective of this paper is to investigate the performance of community-based rangeland management institutions in Mongolia by analysing the specific characteristics of pasture user groups that affect rangeland quality. The primary interest of voluntary herders groups is the joint selling of animal-based products and small-scale seasonal products over relatively short periods of time. Their membership is not based on permanent pasture land boundaries. The focus of this study is therefore on PUGs rather than on voluntary herders' groups.

The conditions under which groups of users will self-organize and sustainably govern the resources upon which they depend is an important subject of research in the literature on common property resource management. Agrawal, 2001, Agrawal, 2003 synthesises the factors affecting sustainable governance of the commons, as identified in three influential studies by Wade (1988), Ostrom (1990) and Baland and Platteau (1996), further extends the set of determining factors, and integrates them into a theoretical framework. We will use this integrated framework as the theoretical framework of our study.

The empirical analysis is based on survey data collected from 330 herding households, living in 7 aimags (provinces) in three different ecological regions in Western Mongolia. PUGs have been introduced by different donor projects in this region over the last decade. A mixed effect regression model will be used to identify the main characteristics of PUGs that influence rangeland quality.

This paper is structured as follows. Section 2 presents a literature review of rangeland management practices and livestock sector development in Mongolia. It includes information on trends in herd sizes, rangeland area and rangeland carrying capacity. In section 3, we discuss the implementation of the theoretical framework for the specific case of the surveyed pasture user groups in Mongolia. In section 4, the research methodology and hypotheses are presented. This section includes a discussion of the research area, the data collection method, and the model used for the regression analysis. It also presents hypotheses on the expected impact of different PUG characteristics on rangeland quality. The estimation results of the linear regression model are presented and discussed in Section 5. The final section summarises the main empirical findings and discusses their implications for the ongoing rangeland management initiatives in selected regions of Mongolia.