COS 48-10
Do community-based institutions sustain grasslands in Mongolia?
In the early 1990’s, Mongolia adopted a market economy, initiating major changes for the herders managing one of the largest undeveloped grassland systems in the world. Former herder collectives were dismantled and formal institutions (norms, rules) regulating the use of pastures were lost. Herding communities have since established over 2000 community-based rangeland management (CBRM) organizations across the country to improve livestock grazing management and reverse perceived declines in grassland productivity.
Despite two decades of experimentation with community-based management in different parts of the world, it is still not clear if and when they reach their ecological goals. Here, we compared the health of grasslands managed by formal community-based herder groups with those without such formal management. We hypothesized that more formal groups would negotiate better rules of grassland use than less formal traditional neighborhoods, resulting in better grassland health. We sampled vegetation and soils in 36 paired districts, 18 districts with CBRM organizations and 18 without these organizations across ecological zones in the desert steppe, steppe and mountain steppe. Our design explicitly controlled for grazing intensity by sampling plots along grazing gradients at 100, 500 and 1000 m from livestock camps or water points. At each 50 x 50 m plot (n=428) we sampled standing biomass, plant cover, basal gap, species richness, and soil and site characteristics. We also compared paired time series of MODIS NDVI data in districts with and without CBRM organizations from 2000-2013 to quantify changes in biomass accumulation, seasonality of greenness and vegetation condition. We then analyzed all data using general linear models and ordination techniques.
Results/Conclusions
In the desert steppe, CBRM pastures supported twice the aboveground biomass than non-CBRM pastures. More mesic CBRM pastures in steppe zones had three times more shrub biomass and four times more sedge biomass than non-CBRM pastures. In the forest and mountain steppe, biomass effects of CBRM were more muted, with moderately more forb biomass, but no more grass or overall biomass. At the district level, however, we could see no differences in NDVI seasonality, biomass accumulation or vegetation condition in districts with and without CBRM institutions. We conclude that more formal CBRM institutions have been moderately effective in promoting grassland health in Mongolia. Our other work suggests that these organizations encourage herders to be more innovative and proactive in managing their grasslands to promote sustainability.