Paper short abstract:

This paper presents a case study of pastoral management in the suburban regions of a secondary city in north Mongolia. This study will hopefully dispel the fixed image that pastoralists have returned to traditional ways of herding and living after the transition from a socialist to a market economy.

Paper long abstract:

The introduction of a market economy based on private ownership in the early 1990s has had significant impacts on pastoralists in the former Soviet Union and Mongolia. Previous ethnographic studies have pointed out that, after the transition from a socialist to a market economy, pastoral economy has shown an increased preference for a domestic-subsistence orientation as opposed to a market orientation. In the context of Mongolia's transition, it has been suggested that households with a small number of livestock acquired through the privatization of state-owned enterprises tended to increase the size of their herds by reducing the high annual offtake (Sneath 1999). However, this suggestion is too one-sided because the regional and individual gaps in pastoral management had expanded along with the collapse of the homogeneous pastoral production system during the collective period. In this study, I discuss how pastoralists survive and cope with such conditions based on a case study of suburban areas in Mongolia. Based on my previous research, I realized that individual households in suburban areas adapt to socioeconomic changes by adjusting access to land and labor through centralizing or dividing their own herds. These practices of socially organizing herds appeared to have spread in the processes of industrialization and urbanization which began in the late 1950s. This paper performs a comparative analysis between Orkhon District (a former pastoral cooperative) and Serenge District (a former state farm) to reveal the characteristics and transformation of pastoral management in the suburban regions of a secondary city in north Mongolia.