Xiaoyi:

First, we are facing many problems; we need experience from other countries. Second, we need new theory, new thinking. If we just follow the old paradigm, maybe we cannot find the solution for the problem.

This time we would like to have interview or conversation with you. I think we would like to have more information on the following aspect. First, the whole picture of Mongolia. What happened in Mongolia after the decentralization from communal society? After the collective was dissolved, what happened in rangeland in pastoral society, including ecology, culture, and social structure and so on? Second, what theory, especially the new theory, can solve these problems? Thirdly, what you did? How to do that, including theory, problems and methods? What works and what do not work? Finally, what you think about the implication of your theory, study and practice to China?

Maria:

Introduce ourselves and introduce how we have known each other. When you invite me for this interview, it is much honored. But I also felt a little awkward to speak just from my perspective about Mongolia. There are many scholars I work with so long time. Anyway, a little bit from my background. My name is Maria Fernandez-Gimenez. My undergraduate training is actually in philosophy. In graduate school, I started to study rangeland. And I initially focused on rangeland ecology and management. And I began to broad it out to understand human component as well as ecological component. And my interest on grassland came from my own personal experience. When I graduated from university with a degree of philosophy, in United States, you cannot really get a job. I grow up in a small city, a small town with a college. It is surrounded by farmland. And I always was interested in animals, especially horses. When I graduated, I went to work for a ranch in western United States. I first worked for a small cattle ranch in Colorado. And later I worked for a very large sheep ranch in Wyoming. And that is a place having many similarities with Mongolia, an extensive system with a large number of sheep in 1988. It is very similar on the picture on your wall. It is still mobile. I worked for a man who had about 10,000 mother sheep and had about 15 herders working for him. And we move the livestock from desert in the winter to the steppe in the spring and fall and up to the high mountain in the summer. So that is where I had my personal experience as a herder and doing that work and working with other herders who were not American. They were from Spain and Mexico. I respect a great deal their knowledge and their understanding of the animals and animal behavior and their skill of being a good herdsman. That is where I got my interest in grassland in the ecology of grassland the management and the people who worked on them. That eventually led me to go back to university and become a scientist to understand process of degradation, whether they were really happening. There were a lot of claims about degradation in the western United States. I wanted to have the knowledge to judge for myself what was really happening as a scientist. So that is a long introduction to how I begin to study grassland and the people who live on them. Until I started graduate school around 1990, which is in the course of big changes around world, especially in Eastern Europe, and in the former communist country in Asia, actually I heard a radio program in United States about Mongolia and about first democratic election in Mongolia in 1990. That was the first time that I ever really thought about Mongolia. And when I heard of this program, they were describing how the country was still herding people and mobile, nomadic herding people. And they had tremendous turnout in their first election. So I just became fascinated in why pastoralism in this country had been sustainable and whether it had been sustainable. Most of the all, as you know, herders are marginalized, they are minority of the population of the country there they were in Africa and many other parts of Asia. But in Mongolia, they were the dominant culture and a large proportion of population. And I thought that we hear so many narratives of doom and gloom about the grasslands around the world that nomadism is dying, pastoralism is outdated, a backward way out of life, grazing is destroying the rangeland around world. It is not a sustainable way to use the grassland. So we heard it from the United States, heard about Africa, and thought that in Mongolia, pastoralism seems to be sustainable. They have existed for thousands of years with this livelihood. They are going through this huge dramatic change in their political system and their economy. I became curious, were they an example perhaps the only one in the world, of a sustainable pastoral system. So I wanted to go and first ask that question was it really sustainable? And if so, what would happen to that system with the major political and economic changes. The huge changes, how would they affect herders?livelihoods, their patterns of land use, movement management, and what would ecological consequences of the changes? So these were the main objectives. At that time, there are very few westerners working in Mongolia. But I began to read and ask and try to find out who is working there and find out there might be an opportunity we can go work with. You may know from Cambridge University, there are David Sneath and Caroling Humphrey who are working there, from University of Sussex, in the Great Britain Jeremy Swift and Robin Mearns were working in Mongolia. And then there were anthropologists from the United States, Mell Goldstein and Cynthia Beall who were working in Mongolia. You may know Mell Goldstein, who also a famous scholar is working on Tibet in the United States. I wrote to all these people and asked if they could help me to find an opportunity to work in Mongolia. One of them never answered me. One of them did answer me but said that I am sorry, we cannot really help you but here there are some people in my contact. And then Jeremy Swift said that we are going to have some work in Mongolia next summer. We cannot pay, but if you can come to Mongolia, you can come with one of our team and we will provide you interpreter and you can work as a volunteer to assist this project you have the opportunity to travel through this country and you can help us and you can get data. So with that support in 1993, I made my first trip to Mongolia, and Batbuyan Batjav was also involved in this project with Dr. Swift. They actually had 6 teams working across Mongolia. We were in different teams. But we met at the beginning of the summer. And then before I went back to the United States and continued my studies, I made a preliminary contact with Batbuyan and several other research institutes to find out if they were willing to host me to do my dissertation later. Maybe Batbuyan should introduce himself.

Batbuyan:

My background is geography. I work in the Institute of Geography, part of Mongolian Academy of Science. And since the transition to a market economy in Mongolia, a lot of what I learnt before the transition seemed to be useless. I have to learn again. That is why I have a chance to work with other researchers like Sneath, Humphrey and Swift. So I expect my work turned to the development role because at that time the transition caused lot problems: problem of overgrazing, the problem of how to solve social and economic needs of herders. Many questions herders had to be faced. That kind of question we get out. And I was involved in these projects to look at these issues. I did have a Ph. D on a broad topic on a more related to geography. I have to see how to redraw administrative boundaries according to their land management because this a movement pattern, which allow herders have all seasonal grazing area, which allow herders move more freely. During the social change, the track of movement had been fragmented. Anyway, my background is social geography. And for these years, I have more worked in development research. And I am still learning. I am learning a lot, that is why I am very proud to work with Maria in a lot work. And new idea and trying some way to experiment and try to through this knowledge to understand what was happening in Mongolia.

Maria:

Batbuyan has a unique position. For me he is a scientist and academic. He has two roles. He is in a research institute, as a scientist committed to doing research that will benefit his country. After the transition, many scientists in Mongolia left the research world and became a people in donor organizations or into another sector because the shortage of financial support for science. But he continues to be committed to his role as a scientist, but at the same time, he has also worked a lot with different development projects. I think he has a unique perspective from both side as a scientist and practitioner, and each informs the other. And our backgrounds are complementary. I am trained as a natural scientist in ecology and have become a social scientist although my formal training has limited social sciences. And Batbuyan was trained as more social sciences. And Prof. Bazargur was really had a very important understanding close relationship between the natural system and social system. And they were related with movement. And we have that kind of overlapping. You know, I have some skill from training and some kind of research, and Batbuyan has a wonderful skill in the participatory action research, and anything to do the map and the people. And we were really worked as a team in 1994 to Mongolia when I did my dissertation. So I could never have done my dissertation without their assistance. And since then, I was in Mongolia for a year and a half doing my research. Most of the time I lived in the countryside with herders. And then I had a chance to come back again in 1999 and go back to the same communities to resurvey them. And again Batbuyan came with me and we have published that research together. And again in 2006, we were able to go back a third time to the same communities and same households, and write together about our work. And I think that we worked on another project where we did not go to the same community but similar theme to look at the implementation of Mongolia Land Law, how it is affecting herders, land use patterns. And by 2006, there was really the beginning of a movement of community-based resource management. It was donor supported projects throughout Mongolia. And I was really interested in understanding that. And Batbuyan was working in some of the projects. Until we began to look at that also and do some research, and now since last summer we held a big meeting in Mongolia, it was really the inspiration for the meeting held here (in Beijing in April 2009). Now we are trying to find support both from US and in Mongolia through a large collaborative research organization and also donors and NGOs to put together. Anyway, we are working towards a long term; I would say a visionary, research program in Mongolia, to understand the process and outcomes of community-based management. In the United States, if we are lucky, we get funded for three years, maybe five years, at the most for five year. But to really understand what happened, we need to be thinking in a perspective of twenty years or more. So it will really take a commitment by many organizations, especially Mongolian institutions, to carry it forward. And CSU (Colorado State University) may serve as a catalyst to help get people fired and empowered to do it. It will really be up to the Mongolians to make it work over the long term. We are just in the beginning of time to think if we can make this vision a reality. And last summer, we held a collaborative research planning meeting in Ulaanbaatar that involved 10 to 14 different research and education institutions in Mongolia, also many many donors and NGOs and officials from variety of ministries, and about 20 herders. We had over 100 people come over a week-long period and together we developed a vision for a long-term research program on community-based rangeland management in Mongolia. Similar with we did here [in Beijing], you have a little longer time and we work a planning on long term research program came up with heavy priority on the research, question and outline for the same design, and also for some other activities. The idea has three goals. One is to advance the science and practice of community-based management; another is to build the capacity, especially the young Mongolian scientists. Finally the third objective is to strengthen linkages between natural resource policy and science. So that is our vision moving forward. It is going to take everybody to make a commitment.

Xiaoyi:

Could you please give us a whole picture in the rangeland after the transition in

Maria:

I think your question has two parts; the first part is what happened. Then we can get the answer. I can give my perspective and it is narrow, but it is much broader. In the first summer when I went there in 1993, that is early just one year after the very rapid transition to market economy. In 1992, the collectives were dismantled and the collective assets were distributed to the former members of collectives. The livestock was divided up. Each household received a certain number of livestock. The division was done in different way in different places, but usually according to the number of each household. The other assets like equipment, tractors, wells were also divided up. Initially some of them were handed over to the cooperative, but most of these cooperatives did not last very well. So most of the assets were just dispersed in the community not necessarily in a very equitable way. So the assets of the collectives were distributed in one way or another. The services that had been provided by the collective and by the government also and all the support almost vanished. So things like veterinary care became privatized. People had to pay for the veterinary service, which before, during the collective era, was free. The emergency fodder supply (fodder in the snow storm), that system still existed but it didn抰 work very well. Schools and clinics and so forth were still there, but much reduced in their capacity and their resources. Things like pension funds that retired and disabled people relied on were often late and very often there was just no money and people would not be able to get their payment. The first year I was in Mongolia, that was 1993, there was a big winter storm. The market was not functioning. So there was shortage of food. We were doing field work in the summer, and you could not find anything to buy to eat in the store in the countryside. We worked far away from Ulaanbaatar. When we went to the soum center to find something to cook for the research team, you would be lucky to find flour and tea and that is about it. The flower, tea and badminton birdies, things that do not make any sense. Nomadic herders do not need badminton birdies. There was a shortage of food and herders had no way to sell their products. In the past, they had a small number of livestock they used for their own consumption and for everything else they depended on the government to care for them. And they earned a salary. Now herders have no salary. They had to market their own animals. There were no markets, they had no idea how they could access the market. And they also had no way to buy the essential things they need to live. So things were very bad immediately after the transition to a market economy. But the market began to emerge in the time I was there between 1994 and 1995. During this period of time there is a big boom in the itinerant traders, who were opportunistic individuals from the aimag center and soum center. Maybe somebody managed to get a truck, whether from the former collective or just bought one. And they will go around and go to all the individual households. 揙k, I will by your sheep and whatever products? and they would have resources to go to the city to get some goods to bargain with. So in the back of their truck, there would be 10 sewing machines, 50 kg bags of flour, and maybe some vodka and Pepsi. And herders had no idea on what were the reasonable prices and information about the market and therefore the terms of trade for herders were very poor. So that is how it began and then over the next period of time the market development information improved and there began to be more access to products and information. A little bit more a functional market but still there are inequities in access to the market and a lot dependence on the transportation and your social network. Smart herders who were able to organize, who were clever to figure out how they could most efficiently get to market, would get the best price.

Batbuyan:

Before this transition, a lot of herders?things were subsidized, and most came from Russia. When the Russian stopped that provides, the government cannot pay anything. There are problems at that time. And suddenly, the Chinese market was open. And that is why the orientation is towards southern regions. And traders from China came looking for the cashmere, wool. That is why they started to trade again. In the term of society, in the beginning of transition, there were very few herders. But the transition caused a lot of factories to close down, and people in the city get jobless. And most of them move to the countryside to survive. And that is why some of them to herders become. But after the competition, some herders get survived, some of them cannot compete. That is why some of the group of herders started to realize they cannot be the herder and can be trader. He knows from whom he can get, and get truck and started to transport. And slowly started to live the economy is still depending on the herders. And the development rural area was in the stages. Until 1995, this was very difficult time, when there was shortage of food, no gasoline. All those used to come from Russia were stopped until 1995. And suddenly, in countryside, we have coco cola and other goods not from Russia but from China, all kinds of good, clothes and food. Up to 2000, the development of herder get more faster. There was very big pressure on the environment; those goods provided by traders were very expensive. In order to buy these goods, herders had to increase the number of animals.

Maria:

And in one year when I was there doing some field work in 1994 and 1995, cashmere was just starting to become a big source of cash income, especially in the Gobi. There were a few big companies in Ulaanbaatar, including a state-owned company and a private company. They were going out to buy the cashmere in the Gobi and Jinst Soum, my study site. And the companies come at the very early spring and late winter before the season for collecting the cashmere. They make a contract with herders. They come with their truck having nice things, including motorcycle, sewing machine, and television, and Honda generator and a lot of vodka. And they would say 揌ow many goats you have? This many kilos of cashmere? Can you promise me to give me these many kilos of cashmere? Right now, I will give you a motorcycle and a case of vodka? So we began to see the herder would be potentially in debt with the company and owe them the cashmere. And again they had no information about the price. You know, one person here might be able to strike a very good bargain, and next person just sell without bargaining. We saw people trading hundreds of dollars of cashmere for decorated playing cards. There were a lot of problems in the community with alcohol. It was a really tragic combination of motorcycles and vodka. Just in the community where I lived, there were several fatal accidents when I was there because of that combination. That was an early time. The important things that Batbuyan said there was a big influx of people who came from town and city to the countryside because they lost their jobs but they have been born in the countryside and they were officially registered member of the collective, so they had the right to claim livestock from the collective during privatization and the right to graze in the soum where they were born. They came back and to get their share of livestock. In my study site, some cases, the number of herding households doubled between 1989/1990 and 1994. So twice as many herding households. And half of them were households that really knew nothing about herding because most of them were from city and town. So you began to have heterogeneity of norms and conflicts over pasture because some people have been here and they have customary areas they used during the collective period, but now the new people want to have a winter camp, they need pasture, they need water, so that began to create problems. And at the same time, under the collective system, the collective/government had been quite strong, in China probably. And the collective provided the strong institutional framework for regulating pasture use, controlling the number of animals, controlling the movement as well as providing the support to make long distant moves. After the collapse of the collectives, there were no rules, no one tell you how many animals you can have, where you can move, which pasture you have to graze. During the collective, the bag leader would say, the pasture is getting too low here, let me move your household over to this new pasture. Or a snowstorm is coming; I will take you on Otor to another soum. So all of that went away after the collectives folded. And you have people who lack the skill. Many people lack the access to transportation. And you know, when you抮e a nomad, transportation is a big problem. If you want to move, but you do not have a truck or gas or camels that are trained to carry and horse for you to ride, and you do not have the labor, it is very difficult to move. According to my observation in my research, one of the main constrains for moving was just the access to the transportation and to labor. We found significant differences in mobility that were related to poverty. And that affects both supply and demand, because wealthy household have more animals, they need to find more pasture, often more distant pasture to support their animals. So they both have bigger demand to move, but they also more likely to have the resources to move. They are more likely have more labor, more likely pay for transportation for them, more likely have enough camels to move, or they have strong social network and they can borrow camels or have a friend to have a truck to help them to move. We were seeing those kinds of things which were affecting mobility. For the households with fewer animals, they may have thought, 搘e do not really have to move, we do not need that much pasture, we were old or we were young, we had a lot of children, we do not even have motorcycle or truck, only one horse or camel, so how we are going to move??So we have talked about changes in the livelihood, how these affected changes in land use patterns, and also the regulatory and institutional framework they are experiencing. The combination of increasing poverty or increasing differentiation in the wealth and access to resources between households, no strong formal regulation from the government, no strong customary regulation, those things combine to reduce mobility. And then whole bunch of new herders came to the countryside in addition, increasing pressure on the resources and increasing conflict. And that conflict also discouraged people from moving much, because if you had you winter pasture, you need to have during the winter or your animals will die. And if you think I would like to go over here, the summer pasture there, but if I leave, one of these new herders may just move from the aimag center and just stay here in my winter pasture during summer. So I cannot leave and just stay here and guard my winter pasture, even if it means my animals grazed on the winter pasture in the summer. So there began to be this problem of year-round grazing. The influx of new herders competing for this pasture increased, and together with the lack of any kind of cooperation or regulation either formal or informal, it began to be a kind of a downward spiral. A positive feedback of a bad kind. The pasture was overgrazed. The winter pasture, but you do not want to move because other people will graze it. This became a kind of downward spiral, an unsustainable practice. And market situation also fed into that because people were looking for social services, no government support for the marketing, so the people will not be able to buy what they needed. So herders tended to say near settlements, where they had better access to markets and services, and this also kept them away from the more distant, better pastures. A lot of livestock were concentrated in a limited area. And the wells began to break down; they had been maintained by the collective. Many of the wells were broken and not functioning, herders do not have the technical knowledge to fix them, so you have fewer and fewer water sources, and people were concentrating around those fewer and fewer water sources. So many factors in early 1990抯, the declining mobility, increasing pressures on pastures, but at that time, when we first worked together in 1990抯, there was not much problem of too many animals overall. It was just too many animals in the wrong places for too long a time. But there was lots of unused pasture where people wouldn抰 go to because they did not have transportation and all the other needs. But then between 1995 and 1999 when I came back again, the number of livestock overall began to grow and grow, so you did begin to have the problem not only in bad distribution of livestock but maybe in some parts of the country just too many animals probably for the area.

Batbuyan:

Just on top of them, we have surveyed situation that from the periphery a lot of people move to the central parts on the whole country, so the central part of the country got overcrowded from herders from the periphery bringing their own animals. Animals increase needs to sell in order to become cash, the market are all in the central parts, so central parts must become overcrowded.

Maria:

So you have local level dynamic and you have national level dynamic now. And initially, we saw people from the city moving back to the countryside, and then as the country developed more rapidly, there was more and more economic opportunity in the city, and you began to have a backflow from the countryside to the city. And then we had several very dry years, lot of livestock in dry years, and then very bad winter weather between 1999 and 2003. Dzud (snowstorm) happens about every eight-12 years but snowstorm in some severity probably only happen every 20 to 15 years. These were the major events, for example, my study site, 75 % of all animals died between 2000-2003. And in my particular community of 35 households, when I went back in 2006, only four were left. So everyone lost their livestock and they had to go work in mines. Mining began, or going to the city, and completely change their livelihood. A few families hung on and stayed there. This was really what triggered the interest in community-based management. A formal community-based management is supported by and catalyzed by a variety of donor and NGO projects. So the combination of concerns with risk management, how to prevent such disasters from having negative impacts on human welfare, and also recognizing the increasing risk of degradation, and the problem of increasing population. So Mongolia as a whole between 1990 and mid-1990抯, it changed from zero poverty according to the government to 40 % poverty in the country, so a very big increase. This is according to the government metric. So this really led to diverse efforts all happening more or less the same time but sponsored by literally dozens of different organizations. And some were focused on some topics; some came from the perspective of integrated conservation and development, so they were sponsored by big environmental NGOs, international NGOs. Some of there were really big, some of them were medium or small size but really focused on the biodiversity conservation but on the band wagon with community-based conservation.

Xiaoyi:

A question: why these donors induced community-based management into Mongolia but not privatization of rangeland?

Maria:

It is interesting but you have two competing paradigms in Mongolia. In the early to mid-1990抯, one of the interesting things was?I was there as a young PhD student. Batbuyan is also the same age with me. We have children at the same age. So I was a young PhD student. At the same time, there was a group of young Americans recently graduated from Yale University and University of Oregon Law School, who were hired by the United Nations Biodiversity Project in Ulaanbaatar. Among the people who were first of all very concerned with the environment, but also promoting integrated conservation and development as a kind of solution. But at the same time, you know, there were consultants coming from different background, some consultants from International organizations, they were economists. They could be considered neoliberal in their perspective. The solution is that a market in land is inevitable in Mongolia, one way or another; there will be privatization of land. It is just a matter of time. We need to figure it out how it happens rationally. And the first step to do is a cadastral survey. And then we need to figure out how to title. So there were a lot of reports on those kinds. There was conservation and development. Then there were few little voices saying 揵y the way, by the way, nobody wants this, nobody wants this. There is no support among any herders and local government for privatization of pastures. They are entirely opposing it by the way? So I think I saw my role in part as a researcher. I am a scientist and I am there to try to understand the situation from a scientific point of view in an objective way. I have biases of course. Everyone has biases but I try to be transparent about my biases and my values. And as a scientist, Batbuyan and I have discussions. My aim is to improve our theories, to develop hypotheses, and to weigh the evidence in favor or against these hypotheses. In other words, I do not set out to prove a particular hypothesis, but rather to test it, and to determine whether or not evidence collected in an unbiased way supports the hypothesis or disproves it. And really as a scientist, you need to try to ask a question of such way that it can be disproved. I thought that a part of what I could do as a researcher was to document the voices of the herders, the local officials, and all the way up to the top ministry level. By interviewing all these people, and by gathering quantitative survey data, and publishing it as scientific papers. That was one way to transmit the herders?voices in a way that maybe has some impacts on the policy makers. Maybe they would say, 揕ook? Really we surveyed hundreds of people, interviewed hundreds of people. Among these people, there was really no one who supports these ideas (of privatizing pastureland). Yes, they recognize the challenges and difficulties, lots of discussions of that. It is not a black or white question; we have spent lots of time, long conservation with herders. We have asked many probing questions:攚hat is a use right? What is possession? Will you support [formal tenure] if it looks like this? What would it have to look like for some kind of formal property rights to work??That is the discussion when those competing ideas from different sides. Environmentalists thought to use community development, community-based management as a way to get their goal of conservation. Then on the other hand, you have true believers in the market, and the only way to have sustainable management is to change the incentive system, the only way to get people to manage it sustainably, is to give them an individual exclusive right. And to do that, the only way is to have private property system of some kind. So that was another paradigm. And then there has been a voice in Mongolia we started to working there because when I began working with Jeremy Swift and Robin Mearns, the people who were familiar with the theories of commons, common pool resources, that was some of my training also. Well, there maybe is an alternative, maybe there is a middle ground, and you can have property rights that are held collectively, they do not have to be held individually. In fact, in very arid and variable systems, where mobility and flexibility are important, we need to think about the sustainability triangle. 1) what is the ecosystem, what is the dynamic of ecosystem? 2) then what practices, like mobility, are able to foster long term sustainable use of this kind of very variable system? 3) What is the institutional arrangement that supports these practices? What kinds of property rights are appropriate for the system? And then recognize Mongolia is a very geographically diverse country, and you have very productive high mountain pastures, forest areas, you have amazing areas in eastern Mongolia that grass grow as high as my shoulder, only good year, and then you have the desert. So the same policy is not appropriate because it is different. We have to understand what the ecological dynamics are, we have to look at how historically it was managed, how people adapted over thousands of years to live with the environment, and take our cues from the environment, the traditional management practices. But then be aware of the people抯 aspiration to develop, to increase their financial well-being. You know, what do they want for their family, their children? Is that compatible with continuing a mobile way of life? What kind of institutional arrangement will enable them to? Is there still some win-win for everybody concerned, for the land, for the people? And then the government, this is not a wealthy government, does not have resources, how it can provide public services to people in the remote places. Maybe they want to continue to be mobile; maybe we can a property right that will work for them to remain mobile in remote places. But how we get them health care? How we educate the children? How could we get them the benefit/access to global market? So all those things together make it very complex situation (I would say) after the big disaster and during that disaster. Probably the timing was right for what is happening in the theory and the practice of community-based management conservation at that time. All the donors said 揙h, it seems a new solution we can try.?But happened to be in my view, potentially is a very good thing for the Mongolia.

That抯 the interesting thing for us. Mongolia is perhaps, I think it might be the best place in the world right now to study community-based management because essentially a nationwide huge social experiment is going on, well replicated. At least 20 donors and NGOs are sponsoring multiple projects in multiple soums and ecological zone across the country. So there is an opportunity to look at different designs. Community-based management, so even just in our meeting, the two Mongolia projects came presented on two of the major donors to support these efforts, but they took very different approaches. One of them is based on determining first the territory boundary and then say 揙K, everyone within the territory automatically is part of this group? and a little bit conflict there since you said you are automatically part of group, all but it is only voluntary, only if you want to, it only work if everyone really participates. But I mean that is a group of much larger, it is a kind of conflict between it is voluntary and not voluntary. And then the other project takes the approach of identifying herder groups based on their social group. These groups are usually much smaller, you know groups define themselves socially and then we draw the territory around the areas they use, but maybe there is overlap with another group. So two different kinds of models, side by side, and each of them replicated many times and across different ecological zones. So from a scientist抯 standpoint, what a great opportunity to compare what design works best for which situation. And we also have side by side districts in the same ecological zone, one which received assistance from a project to create an organization, and one which did not, and so the question we get to ask is what the alternative is? Does it work? Maybe or maybe not. But what is alternative? How is it compare to what would happen to other one? And most of time around the world no one asks that question. But in Mongolia, we have that opportunity to ask that question, side by side, same ecological context, and same political, social and cultural context. Side by side, this one has the intervention and this one did not. Is this really better than the alternative or not? That is why I am so excited about this because I really think that, I really personally believe that I cannot think of any better place in the world to look at community-based management, especially in rangelands. But really almost stand other resources because it is very challenge to do a scientific research regularly. And Mongolia, you have variation in the environment, but you also have, within each ecological zone, a lot of homogeneity. Your have variation in culture but overall there still have a lot of homogeneity in the history and production. So the scientific principle, you try to limit as much as variation then just change one thing at a time, isolating the factors so you can really tell what is causing a result. And Mongolia is the situation where the thing we are studying (community-based management) actually can be well replicated across the gradient of the environment and across the different project designs. So it is a huge opportunity to learn and because the policy environment at the national level is weak, and the policy makers are asking what we should do, we do not know what we should do. What a great opportunity! OK, what happened in all these community efforts, donor sponsored investments to fund this activity? We just figure it out; we just tell you what works. There is an opportunity here to actually have bottom-up national level policy based on what actually works on the ground. When did this ever happen? Almost never, I think. Maybe I am na飗e. But the other remarkable thing in Mongolia, people are interested in learning, try to think this openness to this learning process. At that community level, but to some degree, you know I think the two projects presented on our meeting is an example, particularly Green Gold. These are learning organizations. You know, Dorligsuren, interesting man, they had that program in a way he is an old time socialist guy. That was his education, but he is a very adaptive, very smart man and he has created a learning organization, which is about learning from what they are doing and fixing that, adapting, and continuing to be there for long term. They are not a sort of three-year project, one system for everything. So not all organizations are like that, but that organization, partly because of his leadership and also others above him, they also build capacity. So they have really given their young staff a lot of opportunity to get educated. They send them abroad, send them for six months to Iceland to learn English, to learn community development, natural resource science, statistics. They send people to the United States to work with the best or top researchers in the United States on issues of rangeland. Dorligsuren himself actually come to our university for three months last year because he wanted to learn more about community-based management. How is the theory about? They are oriented to large and long-term investment in human capital in Mongolia to build the capacity for science and practice, and bring those together and add it to be very serious to learn and improve. So we heard Bulgamaa in the meeting say we try to this experiment of fencing and reseeding, and this experiment failed. It was really important that we learn that this does not work because it is very difficult, pretty much impossible to do that in this environment. (And it costs a lot of money) And you know its cost-benefit is just way-out. Instead of working, oh, it is a failure, let抯 forget it. You know, we want advertize that failure. So we can learn from that. We do not waste our money, and the government does not waste money on the things that are not gonna work. Unfortunately, this is an unusual attitude. I would say that is everywhere including my country.

Zhang Qian:

I have a question for the staff who get capacity building in that learning organization, are they all from local community? How can you define the staff and the member of herder group?

Maria:

Actually, this is more their national level staff, with Green Gold there are small group of people working in Ulaanbaatar.

Batbuyan:

I mean from Green Gold, half and half. But for those people who are working on soil and vegetation are local, who are coming from the countryside, the university, and donors somewhere pick up them and send one they want to back to homeland with certain skills. He hires them to work, and after certain period of time, he realized they are very good and start to send them to everywhere. All of these are half from the countryside and half from the city. They mostly based Ulaanbaatar.

Maria:

They are not necessarily stay in Ulaanbaatar. They go to each of the project site and work with the community members. There is not being in the countryside. But for the other project, the UNDP project, they have very strong local support. And they are strong in capacity building at the community level. And we heard Oyuntulkhur talk about that all the training and capacity building. That project ended several years ago. And it is important thing to ask the researcher what happened after that project end. Are those groups still staying together? And the capacity is still through the project intervention. We are going to pay often the long term. Still too early to say, but at least in Jinst, one of the participants in that team who was unable to come [our our workshop] but was formally project manager, and now she help to start a local NGO in the community that try to continue to support the herders. And now the project support has been gone for two years and the project has continued to function through the NGO. So the capacity happens in different ways and different places. The other difference between the UNDP and Green Gold is that Green Gold抯 training in the local area has really focused on building government capacity. So they communicate with UNDP, and they have complimentary actions. UNDP focused on more herders?capacity, herders?organization, and they have also worked on training on some level and then the management officers, building the capacity for the local government to cooperate with the community.

Zhang Qian:

And another question is, yes, it is very exciting that Mongolia is like a social experiment ground. But in fact, like in Inner Mongolia, there are also a lot of projects. Maybe at the first time, the herders are willing to cooperate in the project. But if the project failed, their attitude will totally changed, especially if there are a lot of fund coming, maybe their objective is to get more money but not the project objectives. So how about Mongolia, if the herders have too many projects, how is their attitude changed?

Maria:

I think Batbuyan will have some direct experience. I would say that definitely has happened. Mongolia has probably more donor money per capita than any other developing country in the world. People are very smart to know how to get projects.

Batbuyan:

They are very smart people. Just one example, we have increase of the well. The different positions, the different way we had the approach. Like if the herders are very poor, it will not going to check any money, it is free. When ADB says they have to like 50:50, some money must be provided by local, and some from project. And then the WB, 70:30 percent. You have UNDP, 70:30 percent. And herders are very smart. They thought that I could come to Maria to ask for money. Maria told him you have to pay 70 percent of the amount. OK, to the other one. They are very smart guy. Now there is one big problem that some herders, he will answer your certain questions as what you like to hear. If you say that is very bad, they say very bad. After three months or six months, if you come and ask different question opposite, they will say it is good. You know, the very smart guy would say and some of the projects for just getting money, not staying for long term, and just implementing and shifting to another project. I have observed that some project just working, finished and left. One project just established in the community, and one of them was providing technical assistance, who gave a tractor. And after one year, when we finished the project, we came back to see how it work. Tractor became very essential. Tractor has been split among the herders, some of them get wheel, some of them get engine. But probably build on the trust, that is very essential because as a society in countryside dynamic changing, not just by number, but by generation, so all the generation have certain skill, knowledge, you have new younger herders who do not any more want to reckon regulation, customary rules. They want some fixed, yes we voted, we will follow them.

Xiaoyi:

Yes, although there have many projects in different areas, how the rangeland is used out of your project area?

Maria:

That is a very huge question. The groups will define the management area either come through the Green Gold, for example, then they draw the management area and the ideas, and they agree internally on how they will use the land, which area in which season when they move, how to monitor. So those may or may not work in different cases. We would just say it is internally. They come to the agreement and they have mechanism for coordinating and enforcing. So we find first of all, they do not have any legal right to that management area because Mongolia has no law that provides for procession of pasture. So they may have a management contract with local government, they give them kind of a stronger sense of ownership and may deter outsider and other members who are using that area, but there is really in fact that no legal basis for that. So there are a lot of situations, especially in a drought, a community may function very well internally, but they do not really have any way to prevent people from elsewhere from coming in and grazing in that area. So there are many instances you have a community that functions well but say there is a drought and their neighbor soum, herders came from neighbor soum and while the community herders are in their summer pasture, herders of neighbor soum coming and grazing that community抯 winter pasture. And for both because of the lack of legal right and because of the customary norms of reciprocity, it is very difficult to prevent that. Some local people are, you know, don抰 seriously want to prevent it because that really goes against culture and goes against their moral economy. And from a practical aspect, they know the next time we might need to go there, so it is better not tell these people no. If we tell them no, then next time when it happened to us, maybe they will not do allow us use their pasture. So that is one of the main issues with the function of community-based management. My hypothesis is that strong community-based management by itself is not sufficient, and in a mobile system, especially the arid ones, you need multiple layers of government for coordination. So, yes, we need strong community-based management institution, but you need arrangements between communities and regional government to really make things to work at nested scales and coordinate so that we can give people such a right to maintain flexibility in a way that does not harm other communities. So it is very complex situation, it is not enough just look at what is happening in the community and defined territory; you really have to look outside as well. So maybe another thing happens. Say the community draws the boundary to have the management plan main thing we need a rest on winter pasture. So to do that were actually go outside of our defined boundary and go graze someone else抯 pasture. So that happens too. So then we might to say what the environmental outcome of the community management. If we just within the boundary, oh, this is great. What a pasture. Animals are fat. This is really succeeding. But we did not look to see what we are doing to the area outside the boundary. So it is the same I think similar to the pastoral in Inner Mongolia in China, household responsibility system. Oh, yeah, it is great inside the fence. It is really good. But what happened outside, where the stocking rate double because they took the animals added to this territory. That is why it is important to look at multiple scales, both in terms of environmental impact, but also in terms of governance.

Batbuyan:

And government has become more important in some case because when in some region get drought, the government orders to move all those people to safe regions. And governor from the local area cannot refuse to accept those migrants. Otherwise, they will be getting some criticism from top ranking administrations. This becomes complex on the connection of the structure of the government.

Maria:

One of the most interesting things I think happening in Mongolia is about the weak and strong government, top-down and bottom-up approach because in general, the national level policy of Mongolia is very weak. There is no law that provides for the possession of the pasture. It is legally the open access. These community-based groups are nevertheless creating their own rules, creating their management plan and entering into contracts with local government. And what is happening is this community thing. First the community of herders in a group decides what it wants do, takes this to the local government and says what would you like to do? What will you approve, and then will you please pass a local decree or khural (local parliament) resolution? One interpretation of that is that this community is really creating policy then the policy is trickling upward. They say this is really what we want do, going to local government and say can you make this local law and resolution. And then when the government passed the resolution, we observed some instances where the community then feels empowered to enforce the rules, and in some cases the local government has posted written papers with the resolution on electricity or telephone poles in the countryside for people to see. This area has been rested. You are not allowed to go in. Sometime the community is controlling the monitoring, and sometime the government assists, including imposing a penalty and fine, which never would have happened in the past. We would ask the local government if they were supposed to regulate the carrying capacity. The government answered: 搚es, but there is nothing we can do? They could even know the loss of that. So these community-based projects are somehow empowering local government, and what would be interesting is to have this influence a national policy. And there are some indications that it may because there has been a draft pasture law. The draft law basically proposes as a national law that pasture land should be allocated to groups of herders collectively. And there might be some problems to the draft law. So experience at community level is working its way up to local government and may have a significant influence on the ultimate shape of the national law.

Xiaoyi:

Do you think there is any obstacle for the community-based resource management? For example, the marketing, the differentiation between wealthy and poor people, and so on. What factors will be?

Maria:

I think there are many challenges, some of which we just mentioned, such as issues of boundaries and mobility, and Batbuyan can say more about it. I think there are a lot of issues within the group too in term of accountability and process. There are some groups that function very well, and that have good process and leadership, transparency, capability, but we also hear lots of reports of groups in which a few, often elite, individuals get all the benefit. I think it is an important question to ask. Perhaps herders that are already more wealthy, and have higher capacity, are more likely to form a group to obtain benefits. I guess my hypothesis is yes, especially in donor project, more likely that the groups that really have strong social capital, strong capacity, and certain level of resources are more likely benefit from donor project. That helps to form the community group, which would help them control the resources. That could be happen in some areas. Even if maybe it starts out with good intention, there are certainly lots of examples of the mismanagement of funds, unequal sharing of benefits. And that leads to conflict between members of the group. These are definitely the challenges. And then was sustainability, was the donor supported it strong? Do they have the capacity and resources to continue the function as the group? Another hypothesis is that successful groups, where they are really created by investment from participating households, have more long-term potential. So everyone put in a share and maybe the donor matched it or maybe not, but where all the households contribute, then there is more of potential for them to last for the long term. If resources are just given to them, then they do not have to invest by themselves, and have less sense of ownership and empowerment.

Batbuyan:

Green Gold is help them 50 to 50. They ask the group how much money you collected, and equal to that amount of money we invest. You can find, from group to group, the fund is different. It is matching. Of course, many communities have social capital, education is very essential. That is why in all of our projects one of the first activities is training, helping them to understand. Recent data shows that nearly 70 percent from people in country city was doing that. In transition period, lot of children were taking away from the school, and those children now at the age of 25 to 30, somewhere starting to play important role in community. But if without educations, they cannot really play that kind of important role. That is why some of groups were educated strong and wealthy to assist donor to operate much that in another groups.

Maria:

There is another consequence in the transition was you have the generation. The household we lived with had eight children, most of them were older and had been educated during the collective period. There were two young sons. And probably because we were there, they did not force their children to go to school. They did eventually go and became educated. We increasingly found that boys in the countryside in Mongolia were not going to school. There was a missing generation. Children who were at the age to begin for early elementary school in the early 1990s to the end of 1990s. Some of them just did not go to school. Some of them only had one-year or two-year education. It is really important because it is really an achievement that Mongolia had a really high level education (98 %), higher level of literacy than the United States. When we did household interviews, we never had anybody that could not read or write. Now those people are older and begin to be community leaders and could have role of impact on the development. The other side is, as you saw with the Mongolia team, girls are more likely to go to school, now there is a generation in the university. And you look at the donor projects; all the middle level staffs are women, really good women. We start to have now from Mongolia project in the graduate school had one PhD student and had many inquiries, all women. We will have two other students, also women. The level of motivation and commitment to developing human capital is a very impressive thing. And you also have entrepreneurs and individuals who are making that investment in their own education. This is not the case for everybody, but this is the case for Batkhishig who will commit to go back to her country and serve the country. This is same with Batbuyan. He had a lot of chances to travel and to the best university of the world. But his commitment is this country and goes back. Not everyone does like that.

Batbuyan:

Nearly 60 percent of income of herders is spent for education. Parents are willing to sacrifice all income. Most of women go to get high education. To get university in Mongolia per year, the cost would be $1,000. Four years would cost $4,000. So it is quite large amount of money for herders. Even poor herders, some of the cases you could see herders buy loan from the bank to cover the cost of education of their children, and pay later by cashmere or whatever.

Maria:

What is interesting, I mean what do you think is: are they doing that, so their children won抰 have to be herders?

Batbuyan:

Statistically, other surveys state that, it is a pity, most powering herders do not see future of animal husbandry because pastoral life, because one day win game but you could lose everything. So that is why a lot of herders sending children to the university, hoping they will get different professions. But of course, within the membership, most people always remain as herders.

Maria:

And I think it is not a bad thing because resources are finite, and rangelands cannot support an ever increasing human population. So I think it is very wise for long term sustainability of the system. Everybody is depending on the rangeland, it should be diversified. And it builds a network between the urban and rural area that have potentially mutual benefit also. It is very interesting that when Batbuyan and I did a pilot study in 2006, after a big snow storm, again we have a big movement out of countryside to the city. So some people lost the animal, they went to the city to try to make some kind of living there. We were interested in that what life like in the city of people who come from the countryside. They want to stay or they want to go back? Again, we never publish this interview, we listen 20 households. We interview in ger district. In the periphery of the city, some of them are very low standard of living. They are living in not a building but still in their tent. And it was interesting the number of people, fewer people I would just think were there because of the dzud. Maybe that is one factor but not the only factor. A lot of them were there to support their children for going to school. They want their children to have better education, so many of their children get college degree. I remember we interviewed one very young herder who comes from the north, he is one of the generation who could not able go to school. When he was quite relatively young, and he had to help maintain the household, so he never had chance to go to school. And he was quite good herder, many livestock. But when he got married and had his first child, he wants to give this child the best education. So he left his family to the city and left his livestock to his relative. So it is very interesting.

Xiaoyi:

But how about the economic development of urban sectors? Can they provide more job opportunity for the people who come from countryside?

Batbuyan:

It is very difficult part. There is not much job, especially this world crisis also make worse. Of course you have to manage those people who come in with low education to get low wage jobs, constructions. Some of them sold all animals, and use this money to buy a car to drive as a taxi-driver. You could see situations where you tell the driver where you want to go but the driver do not know the place. They are work for all kind of job which is low paid.

Maria:

Initially, there were a lot of small businesses. Everyone wanted to become a businessman even if they just sell small pocket of cigarette. One thing that happens that people who were from countryside get the livestock at an economic prices. At that point, people who went to the city were the most marginal in the countryside. So the poorest of the poor is homeless in the city. For a period of time, there is alcohol, abuse, the children on the street and prostitution. So all the worst social problems really happened during the initially term of the transition. The poorest of the poor move to the urban areas, and it is really tragic situation. I think some of them began to improve and change, but I do not know how?/font>

Batbuyan:

But you still have to remember Mongolia is very low population country. Social network is very well developed. So people who come in urban area, they can always find some relatives to get some kind of assistance. Maybe at the beginning, it is difficult kind of situation, but nevertheless they would always get assistance. So they will survive. The social network is most important, which is a key in keeping both sides.

Maria:

Yes, when people go to the city and go back to the countryside because relatives help them. And we did find, when we interview people, they work in the factories, taxi drivers, low-paid jobs. Some of them want to go back, or in the countryside when we interview people who said first came here we did not really know what we are doing, we did not work, and we try in the city and left the city for two years, we hate it. So this is another, I think, my interpretation is a kind of flexibility and mobility. So you have mobility with your animal, and flexibility in rural area, you also have the mobility back and forth between the city and countryside. And that kind of flexibility is a kind of livelihood strategy. When people move in the city, oh, now I saw the television, radio, there is no way to leave. This is the future. When they go to the city, they realize it is terrible to work in the factory. It is really not so good. It is my countryside. I had not money but at least the air is clear, and I have my family and the milk to drink. This is actually a better situation.

Batbuyan:

Related to jobless, large proportion of young generation move out of the country, like to Korea, to Germany, to America for jobs. Those people who going abroad are sending back money. So that is also one source of income for the herders. Some of the herders who have a son who is living in Korea, and each month are sending money. Or parents are sending for the children in order to let children to get good education. So some people go to the countryside, some of them go abroad.

Maria:

When first I came to Mongolia and work in the countryside, you know, few people have even been out of the country. But now when I went to Mongolia last time in 2007 and 2006, they show us the pictures, this is my trip to Hong Kong, this is to New Deli. This is globalization.

Zhang Qian:

This is different from Inner Mongolia. Even in most of the cities in Inner Mongolia, people speak Mandarin. Herders have language difficulty to find a job in the city.

Maria:

What I think about the advantage in Mongolia is potentially to figure out the sustainable management. Because the population is so small, nomadic culture is the culture in Mongolia. Until very recently, most people in government and in any kind of institution were not very far removed from the countryside. They grew up there, or their parents grew up there, they have relatives there. Very few people in 15 years ago did not have understanding of the countryside, and some understanding and appreciation on what a herdsman抯 life is, why people move is important. What I heard from the election was that increasingly you have the people who are representing rural areas do not know anything about rural life and issues. So I do not know what this means for the future. In the past people in power appreciated what that life style meant.

Xiaoyi:

The last question is the reference of Mongolia experience to China.

Maria:

This is interesting because it seems to me that many people in Mongolia, many educated people and policy makers have looked to China, and looked to Inner Mongolia as a model. Oh, they figured out the property rights, they gave individual household responsibility to create incentives for investment. China is a huge global market driver, economic driver for the world. So on the one hand, Mongolia does look to China as a model, and that is very interesting now to realize that actually some Chinese scholars and maybe policy makers and herders are looking to Mongolia, and say 揙h, maybe they have not lost their nomadic culture, they have not privatized and fragmented their land, maybe they have the answer? So each one is looking at the other. And specifically the land policy issue think each situation have strains. Neither one of them has necessarily figured it out. And probably the election of complexity is not an easy problem to solve. There may not be a solution, one solution. But on the Mongolia side, the issue is that the lack of policy, lack of property right, essentially in some respect open access. That is oversimplified. It is not totally open access. It is the complex mixture of custom, laws, and sort of system. But there is not a clear formal policy, there is not strong customary institution and you do have community-based organizations that try to negotiate. But there is a great deal of uncertainty, and that leads to conflict. In some cases, there are a lot of problems there, and there is no regulation on the number of animals. I used to believe it was unnecessary to regulate the number of animals. Now I am not so sure. So on the other side of border, you have opposite situation. You have very strong government; very top-down strong policies. I heard some positive echo from Batbuyan抯 research in Inner Mongolia. Household responsibility was implemented; they have changed the incentive system. They have forced people to think about carrying capacity for people change their herd structure, and to market in a different way, and invest and intensify, and maybe in some ways have some positive aspects for the economy and for the land management. On the other side, we got heard some negative aspects. Research has most familiar with Dee Mack Williams, an America anthropologist, he was doing his PhD at the same time when I was. He was working in Inner Mongolia, and one of his papers particularly talked about the household responsibility system, talked about what happened inside the fence, what happened outside, you are familiar with his work. And the fact that people who have access to resource fenced that area actually get benefit, and other people maybe actually lose because more encroachment on their unfenced property. So that is just a limit the mobility and ability to adapt. I have very little experience in Inner Mongolia. I visited three times, but twice have been to the countryside, and only once stayed couples of days in 2006. When I was there, I observed some of the areas that have a grazing ban, both permanent and seasonal. And what seemed to be happening was that people work finding way to, you know, instead of picking the government offer to buy the livestock to destock, they were holding on to their livestock, and they were leasing pasture in another place. So they were some moving their animals around and gaining access in other way. That is really uneconomic. So they were finding ways to continue to move, but not in a traditional way. They were never stopping movement, especially in part of the country. They still manage as a community. I think it is very interesting. It is an example of weapon of the weak. And your example in Chifeng, you have grazing ban there. Of course people are breaking rules. So I think there is positive and negative thinks to go. There is no one size for all, in either country. There are probably our places in Mongolia where intensification might be appropriate, where fencing, you know, fencing is just a tool. What is the objective? How we want to manage? What is the ecological dynamic? What is the management practice? And fencing can help you accomplish those practices. So what is the potential positive and what is the potential negative. Maybe it can help you accomplish things we really benefit from livestock production, and even environmental ecological sense point for the rangeland. But maybe there are some negative aspects too, maybe it influences wildlife migration. I think for both countries, it is important, you know, barbed wire was invented in the United States, 150 years ago, and it change and transformed the west. But one reason for the fence is that it compensated for labor. You can accomplish the same thing by herding that you can accomplish it with barbed wire. When you have barbed wire, you do not herd there are some negative aspect to livestock and to the land. And there are some places in US. You know, we have mix of private land, state land, but leased to private owners. We have shared management by grazing association, we have collaborative groups. One of things we have seen especially in past 10 to 15 years in the US is groups of ranchers, private property rancher, some who have leases from public land realizing that even though they have very large area of land, still not enough with the very dry and variable climate, so they getting together to think how can we work across our private land boundary and public land boundary and manage as a whole ecosystem and the whole community. In some cases, they are even taking down the fences, and in other cases, they leave the fences stay but they have reciprocal arrangement, just like the tradition in Mongolia. They are saying 揙K, in the drought year, we all graze in this range or we want to restore fire, the natural process. In order to do that, we need to take the livestock off, so the grass can grow enough to carry fire. And then after the fire burning, we need to rest the pasture, you know, three years?/font> rest for the grass to come back. And in order to this, one person抯 will graze his cattle on another person抯 land (with permission)?This is just my opinion. I am telling you focusing on a few cases overgeneralizing, but there are too many examples in the US of moving away from the private property paradigm to work on more creative arrangements, and away from individual to more community collective management. I think all these countries have something to learn from each other. There are some real common challenges that we share all over the world in land management in arid and semi-arid landscapes. And there are also different solutions or opportunities to learn from each other. There is no 損anacea? there is no magic. I think a lot of works need 搉egotiation? individual negotiating the solution in the particular case in the particular landscape, history and context. But there might be some principles that you can learn from. That is why we think the resilience thinking is really important because it is not saying there is one way. If there is a principle of resilience, we have to always think about different options and how we manage so that we preserve all options for the future by maintaining diversity, by maintaining a kind of flexibility, the ability to reorganize the mobility to be creative, and continuing learn things and have strong network and all those kind of things. So I think those maybe are some principles that we can live by. There is not some recipe for pasture land tenure, but maybe these principles.

Zhang Qian:

Batbuyan, how about your opinion after your research in Inner Mongolia?

Batbuyan:

I am still confusing. I have a project, which is funded by the Green Gold, just keep to learn from Mongolia side, what happening in the other side in Inner Mongolia, and what this fencing idea was useful, and how about the ecological impact and social impact. Just like Maria said, fencing some land, inside is good, but outside there is problem. The forbidden grazing for five years project, they are growing. But we have a question: during these five years, where is the animal? Of the animals were gathered to another places, it will cause problems there. And moving herders to the other places, it is costly. After analyzing my data, maybe I can find some answers. But they are very complicated questions. We still hope that we will learn more and more, and more data to help us to understand the objects.

Maria:

I think there is one fault I have found that we talked about social process so much, but ecological aspect. And ecology is always very variable from place to place. What are drivers of degradation? What roles does grazing play? There is no one answer to that either. And this is going to be very different in different areas depending on the soils, and landscape forms and on the climate variation, the evolutionary history of grazing and history of management. So I think it is just like that we cannot oversimplify property rights regime, it is important not to oversimplify the ecological perspective. And one thing I sometimes worry about. Sometimes as social scientists, we hear ecological theory, it kind of supports for our social theories and values. Ahh, look at here is a study, either it says grazing causes degradation or grazing is beneficial or grazing is not making any difference, you can take the study to support your policy point of view. I think we have to be very careful about that and realize that each of the ecological studies is in a particular setting. And for example, Julia conducted a very interesting research with very important result in Tibet. That is a very productive system, very special environment; it is completely different from Inner Mongolia. So I think it is very interesting to know, but I think that the study applies those results to somewhere else, you really have to repeat it in the different environment. Is the same pattern at work? And the same with equilibrium and non-equilibrium rangeland. I think sometime people, especially social scientist, tends to say 搊h, it is a non-equilibrium rangeland that means that, you know, livestock do not really matter? This is a big mistake also. The ecological research that I did in Mongolia suggests that it is a gradient. We have some extreme systems on either end, but most systems have characteristics of both equilibrium and non-equilibrium systems. Those characteristics, the relative proportion vary in space from more productive areas to the more arid areas, but they also can vary within an arid area like Gobi. Most of it maybe is the non-equilibrium, but the wetland (key resources) may be equilibrium and maybe the most important part of that area in terms of livestock forage. So we have to be careful about the management scale and heterogeneity with the landscape. And then also the issue of time in one place, dynamic change over time, so inter-disciplinary research is very important to bring them together, but then what I think we each really must be very careful in reading and taking the information from the other, not to oversimplify. This is just another important thing I learned. And it is difficult because when I come to the policy, the policy makers want easy answer. They do not want the hard answer, just yes or no. They do not like 搘ell, it depends厰 it is difficult for policy maker.