Legal Ambiguity and Land Dispossession: Multi-Scale Conflicting Views on Territorial Authority at the Herlen Bayan-Ulaan State Reserve Pasture Area, Mongolia.

Abstract

The Mongolian government pursues various objectives that are often assumed to benefit citizens, including socio-economic development, biodiversity conservation and innovative technologies in the agricultural sector to adapt to climate change. But, for pastoralists, these activities have allowed the appropriation of pastoral lands from their home jurisdictions, the process of which is often murky and ambiguous. The vision for development held by different international and national agents sometimes fails to recognise the complexity inherent in converting pastoral land for alternative economic and conservation development. This paper examines a recent legal battle focused on the Herlen Bayan-Ulaan State Reserve Pasture Area, where different stakeholders put forward contested claims of authority over rural jurisdictional territories. The conflict is rooted in the ambiguous and conflicting co-existence of liberal and statist approaches to socio-economic policies applied by the Mongolian government. Whereas the socialist period system's imposition of exclusive state control reduced local actors' (government and residents) control and authority over resources governance, the post-socialist period system promoted 'alternative economic and conservation activities' and protected state and individual property rights, leaving mobile pastoralists with highly ambiguous claims. This paper argues that the state ought to have a specific role of providing an adequate legislative and executive framework to support more complex interdependent multi-scale pastoral institutions. This paper describes the changing role of the state in land governance, wherein the state has assumed all management and financial authority while subjecting pastoralists to conflicting legislative and executive policies. This has eroded the local systems of land and resource governance and created an open access scenario, allowing appropriation of jurisdictional pastoral lands. This trend of exclusive state control has the implication of contradicting and dismantling a longstanding interdependent pastoral institutional environment and has been counterproductive to enhancing natural resource management and the adaptive capacity of local actors to climate change.