Institutions in a Pastoral Society: Processes of Formation and Transformation in Postsocialist Mongolia

Mongolia’s herders were catapulted into the “age of the market” on the demise of the Soviet-supported collectivized agricultural sector in the early 1990s. The resultant changes in formal state structures and organizations pertaining to the use and management of Mongolia’s pastoral commons can best be described as radical. However, the impacts on practice and the system of rights and norms by which herders manage the pasture and sustain their livelihoods on a day-to-day basis are less clear-cut. In this article I examine particular institutions central to pasture management, the ongoing and contested processes of their adaptation since decollectivization, and the legitimacy they derive from history and competing notions of “tradition” or “custom” among the herding population. I begin with a brief overview of pertinent aspects of ongoing debates and contrasting positions in the institutional and common pool resource (CPR) literature. The salient points of the Mongolian case study are presented and the specific case study sites are introduced. In the penultimate section, I draw on my own fieldwork data to assess herders’ rights and claims to pasture, the reinvention of “tradition,” and changing and contested notions of “the rules” that shape pasture use. Key findings are summarized in a brief conclusion.

Institutions, Pastoralists, and Common Pool Resources

Douglass North’s classic definition of institutions as the “rules of the game in a society”¹ still resonates through institutional and CPR theory, although its apparent simplicity masks divergent views on the nature and function of institutions within the core literature. In particular the economic rationality approach, drawing on New Institutional Economics and most famously expressed in E. Ostrom’s blueprints and design principles,² still widely employed by development bodies, may be seen as distinct from a second, more “ethnographic” perspective. Importantly, the former, functionalist view implies that “successful” institutions can be crafted by external development agencies, often as formal organizations, and ascribes primacy to economic rationality at the expense of a view of institutions as an integral, often unconscious part of daily life.

By contrast the more ethnographic perspective takes particular cognizance of social and historical factors and the “moral ecological rationality” seen as central in shaping collective action and resource management.³ In this latter perspective institutions are conceived of as “embodiments of social process”⁴ and in terms of actors’ practice, knowledge, and beliefs, in addition to being understood as rules, norms, and organizations. Institutions pertinent to natural resource management are frequently, therefore, not specifically crafted by their users for this express purpose, but rather draw on and are embedded in preexisting social norms, rules, and structures.

In this article, and following the latter ideas, I adopt a broad definition of institutions that includes practice, rules, and norms, as well as groups and organizations, or in other words the whole complex of factors and structures that “influence who has access to and control over what resources, and arbitrate contested resource claims.”⁵

In recent years the sometimes rather abstract, generalized commitment to particular design principles, characteristic of aspects of the functionalist approach, has been increasingly called into question in favor of these more contextualized, dynamic understandings of institutions.⁶ However, the more “socially embedded” or “ethnographic” perspective does not always escape reliance on the assumed dichotomies of state/local and formal/informal institutions that often inform the more functionalist viewpoint. For example, both approaches explore and highlight the importance of the local, but differ in their focus on formal as opposed to informal institutions. The ethnographic perspective is frequently characterized by its focus on the social world and nonpurposive, informal institutions, in other words those not exclusively concerned with and crafted for natural resource management. This is often in contrast to a concern...