2The high temporal and spatial variability of Central Asian rangelands dictates substantial levels of seasonal livestock mobility, which was a feature of both historical grazing systems, governed by customary property rights, and the collectivised state-managed systems of the Soviet period [Robinson et al. 2016]. However, the transition to a market economy has affected these mobile systems in a number of ways. Although loss of subsidised feed increased the necessity for livestock movement, material support for migration either ceased or declined. Infrastructure in remote pastures fell into disrepair, reducing the means to reach and use these areas. In Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan decollectivisation was rapid and accompanied by a collapse in livestock inventories, whilst reform has been more gradual in Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. Today, in all five republics stock numbers are rising and the vast majority of animals are privately owned. Ownership distributions are characterized by a small number of households with commercial flocks or herds, and a larger number owning fewer animals, often for subsistence. Small flock sizes initially resulted in the loss of economies of scale required for movement, exacerbating the abandonment of remote pastures and concentration of livestock around settlements. Many households resolve this problem through participation in collective herding systems – pooling animals to cover costs of shepherding and transport [Kerven et al. 2006; Robinson et al. 2010; Vanselow et al. 2012a].

3During the regulatory vacuum of the 1990s, access to pasture was determined by former state farm boundaries, historical use and ownership of key infrastructure [Behnke 2003; Cariou 2002]. Some spontaneously emerging ‘customary’ arrangements quickly came to exhibit characteristics resembling those of common property regimes, with user groups defined by village residence continuing to use pastures assigned to them during the Soviet period [e.g. Robinson et al. 2010]. At the other end of the spectrum, commonly understood definitions of legitimate user groups and pasture boundaries were blurred, and systems exhibited more elements of open access [Behnke et al. 2016]. Constraints to livestock movement were initially economic rather than legal or political. So, as inventories recovered, animals became increasingly mobile [Ferret 2015; Kerven et al. 2016a].

Environmental discourse: The land degradation narrative

6Today, in particular where steep declines in livestock numbers occurred together with a loss in mobility, there is a mismatch between livestock and grazing resources, leading to pasture recovery in some areas, and degradation in others [Alimaev et al. 2008; Robinson et al. 2016; Vanselow et al. 2012b]. This situation is particularly extreme in Kazakhstan, although recovery of livestock inventories is slowly leading to a re-colonisation of remote pastures [Ferret 2015; Kerven et al. 2016b]. In Turkmenistan, where the state remained engaged in livestock production and numbers have grown, relatively high levels of livestock mobility have persisted and the distribution of animals on the resource is probably more even [Behnke et al. 2005; Behnke et al. 2016], but at the national level, grazing pressure is perceived to be dangerously high.

8Overall, the degradation narrative has been rather simplified, firstly in terms of the causality of vegetation change, in which the relative importance of climatic drivers and livestock grazing are often poorly understood. Secondly, the consequences have also been subject to simplification through lack of rigorous definitions. Little distinction is made between largely botanical alterations, of little importance to livestock raisers, losses in pasture productivity affecting individual animal performance but not total meat output per hectare, and overall long-term loss of economic output. The importance of such distinctions in understanding the meaning of pasture carrying capacity has been described by rangeland scientists working in Africa [Behnke and Abel 1996]. In temperate Asia, the issue can be illustrated by evidence suggesting that Mongolian herders do not always equate species changes related to grazing with a loss in suitability of pastures for livestock production [Kakinuma et al. 2008].

9Whatever the definitions or their accuracy, headline degradation statistics prompted a mobilisation of international funding for the newly independent states. Scientists and policy makers living through economic collapse found that the narrative of degradation became an important leverage for funding. Some of these funds have been directed towards legal reform of pastoral land tenure, based on the idea that property rights are key to sustainable pasture management.

Sustainable pasture management – an evolution in ideas

10Academic debates on the impacts of different property rights systems on the sustainable governance of rangeland resources have been well documented and are thus only briefly summarised here, before we discuss whether these ideas have influences policy making in Central Asia.

11The first type of discourse, common in the past and still influential today, is based on Hardin’s ‘tragedy of the commons’ [1968]. This idea was based on the assumption that pastures were ‘open access’ systems in which use rights are not associated with a limited set of users, allowing anyone to resource at any time. As the immediate benefit to individuals of placing more livestock on the resource would always be prioritised over the long-term loss of grazing productivity to the group, such a situation was predicted to lead to degradation. Subsequently, the observation that true open access systems rare and that the ‘tragedy’ was often avoided through forms of common property resource management (CPRM), was formalised into economic theory Ostrom [1990], and applied to all sorts of commonly held resources. E. Ostrom suggested that such systems of governance could only be effective if a set of rules, including defined geographical boundaries and user-group membership, were in place. From this point of view, the near-village ‘common’ pasture existing in Kazakhstan and Tajikistan are not true common property management regimes as, although they are allocated to the specific group of residents, they are not managed by the users themselves, being the responsibility of village mayors (akims).

12However, there has also been an increasing understanding that in some parts of the world more malleable access rules are also key components of pasture use, particularly where inter-annual variation in pasture productivity or climatic conditions are large [Fernandez-Giménez 2002; Turner 2011]. This emphasis on mobility and flexibility emerged in turn from scientific insights into the nature of rangeland-livestock interactions in Africa [Behnke et al. 1993; Ellis and Swift 1988]. These authors found that in highly variable ‘non-equilibrium’ environments climatic factors such as rainfall may have a greater impact on range condition than grazing by livestock. Research attention came to be focussed on better understanding mobile systems of range management and documenting their increasing fragmentation [Reid et al. 2008].

13Annual rainfall variability in Central Asia is low compared to other comparably arid regions [Gintzburger et al. 2005]. In the regional literature on pastoralism, flexibility – in the sense of a climate-driven need to change grazing locations from year to year – does not emerge as a major requirement for pastoralists outside Turkmenistan and Mongolia. But throughout the region, intra-annual or seasonal mobility is certainly key to exploiting peaks in vegetation productivity and avoiding harsh winter snowfall.

The convergence of ideas and interests in the development of property rights legislation

16Although this special issue focusses on the steppe regions of the former Soviet Union, those republics in which the new thinking on rangeland governance has most influenced reform processes are the mountainous republics of Central Asia, and Mongolia. We thus examine these cases first, before asking whether changes in those countries have influenced reform in the steppe and desert republics of Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan. The general chronology of reform is summarised for case study countries in Table 1 for comparison.

Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan: donor-driven experiments in CPRM

19On the passing of the Law on Pastures in 2009, leasehold contracts were repealed. Pastures are now allocated to village governments and managed by Pasture Committees (PCs), executive bodies of Pasture User Associations (PUAs), through annual allocation of pasture tickets to members. IDO intervention did not stop there; a large World Bank investment project financed the establishment of Pasture Users Associations and Pasture Committees nationwide and a Union of Pasture Users Associations was established to represent the interests of the users at the national level.

20There has been some research into the administrative quality, inclusivity and legitimacy of PCs [Crewett 2015; Dörre 2015; Shigaeva et al. 2016] and it is unclear whether active participation of large numbers of livestock producers in such formal groups is yet forthcoming. It has been suggested that the new law is based on simplistic ideas of what constitutes a community, which is in fact made up of heterogeneous actors with very different livestock wealth and interests [Dörre 2015; Jacquesson 2010 ; Kerven et al. 2012], although it seems likely that the leasing system exacerbated these even further. Certainly, the law is highly prescriptive regarding the structure, function and responsibilities of Pasture Committees, placing high expectations on these and leading to high turnover of leadership. The new law did not solve problems of livestock mobility overnight as many of these problems had been economic, rather than legal or political [Crewett 2012].

21The forms of autonomous pasture management which had started to re-emerge before any laws were applied suggests that CPRM as a concept is unlikely to be utterly alien to users. The unit upon which the law is based, that of the former collective farm, generally reflected both the geographical and membership basis upon which many users had continued to understand how legitimate primary user rights should be defined. What is new, and perhaps alien, is the form in which it has been imposed in terms of the actors on the PC, and that the whole official edifice, from the PUAs and PCs to the pasture department and the ‘representatives’ of users at national level, has essentially been introduced from above according to a single template, based on ideas which had perhaps not fully permeated institutional and scientific thinking in the country. It is possible that, rather than taking on the role of democratic organisations representing members’ interests, PUAs will be perceived as just another organ of local government control – the fact that village mayors sit on the PC leads many users to conflate PCs and village government [Shigaeva et al. 2016]. This may create issues of trust regarding payment and use of fees, supposed to be invested in pastures and infrastructure. Recent proposals that these fees should be paid to central government are unlikely to be an improvement however.

22Kyrgyzstan’s reforms influenced those in Tajikistan, where discussions began just after the 2009 law was passed. Here, pasture sector reforms were undertaken by both IDOs and government agencies, with substantial, if cosmetic, consultation with other stakeholders. The country’s first pasture-specific legislation was ratified in March 2013, but new amendments and revisions to the Law on Pastures are currently undergoing governmental review, pasture-related institutional architecture is still being debated, and diverging strategies for implementing the law are unrolling on the ground.

23With post-independence land reform legislation passed in the early and mid-1990s, the same legal framework was applied simultaneously to both arable land and pastures, and encouraged individual exclusive rights. These included long-term leaseholds from the state as in Kyrgyzstan, but also permanent heritable rights which were theoretically impossible to repeal. During this period some pastures were indeed privatized, whilst others remained de facto commonly managed, with large regional differences [Halimova 2012; Robinson et al. 2010]. This situation had certain social repercussions, and there is evidence that some poorer groups, unable to register land, may have lost access to pasture.

24There appears to have been no single impetus for the creation of pasture legislation in the country In 2010, both the Asian Development Bank (ADB) and the Tajik branch of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) began uncoordinated exploratory work related to pasture legislation— the latter reportedly at the behest of UNDP Kyrgyzstan staff seeking a way to alleviate transboundary pasture conflicts between the two countries.

25The ADB completed its own draft pasture law in 2011, which included provisions for the creation of pasture user groups that would manage “community pasture lands.” It did not, however, seek to overturn existing legislation that governed privatized pastures on dehqon farm land—former collective and state farms that were privatized after independence—so it still allowed for some areas of pasture to be managed privately. Perhaps because officials feared redistribution of pastures held by elites, the parliament initially refused to work on pasture legislation, but later yielded to UNDP-requested pressure from the president’s office, and the government formed a working group who met from 2011-2013 with facilitation from UNDP.

26Half of the official working group members were parliamentary officials, with the rest being split between ministerial representatives and sector experts, all Tajik nationals. Non-members, including IDO staff, communicated their priorities by submitting proposals and reports, presenting to the working group, or meeting privately with official working group members. In general, international staff of IDOs drafted articles for the legislation which were then sent to the Tajik members of the working group for approval, rejection, or editing.

27Though the ADB’s draft legislation was a starting point for discussions within the working group, it was rejected and the writing process was started anew with help from The German Agency for International Cooperation (GIZ). The notion of pasture user “unions” (PUUs) remained in the final ratified version of the 2013 Law on Pastures. However, the current law provides equal rights to pasture user groups and individuals, both of whom may apply for pasture, decreasing the incentive for common management and ownership. Whilst PUUs may be established, their ability to access land depends on the existence of land available to lease in their locality and on the discretion of district authorities to allocate it to them.

28The local experts who participated in the process were Soviet-trained specialists in livestock and botany whose main concerns related to livestock and pasture productivity. As such, rather than having strong opinions about individual versus common management, their main priorities were requiring pasture management plans, restoring pasture land, and maintaining roads and bridges to facilitate mobility. These local experts bemoaned the rent-seeking enclosure of large swaths of pasture by wealthy individuals who didn’t own livestock, and strongly recommended that the law require pasture allocation to be carried out in proportion to the number of livestock held by those seeking to acquire land, whether they be individuals or PUUs. The 2013 Law on Pastures vaguely states that pastures should be allocated with consideration of livestock numbers, but does not specifically address whether this applies to previously privatized pasture areas. There is evidence that in some regions of the country large areas of pasture have indeed been privatised by a few individuals, but geographical variation is significant and because some privatised farms are in fact still ‘collectives’. The national statistics on pasture areas and private farm ownership do not provide a clear picture of the proportion of the population with legal access to pastures [Halimova 2012].

29Though IDOs stressed from the beginning the need for stakeholder consultations regarding the law, public feedback did not play a role in the law’s development. UNDP held five large public events for discussion of the law before it was ratified, and a group consisting mostly of parliament members made 46 trips throughout the country to explain the draft law and to receive community feedback about how the Law on Pastures should be implemented. After the law was passed, the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) inherited UNDP’s role as the primary IDO for institutional development of the pasture sector. IFAD formed a new working group to revise the law, which – unlike before – operated without the involvement of international consultants. In October 2015, the group completed a draft of revisions to the law concerning the creation of new central government bodies for the pasture sector and rules for fee collection by PUUs. Notably, the public consultations conducted regarding the first law were not even mentioned during the revision process.

30The law’s implementation has been uneven and dependent on IDO participation. Those elements of the law relating to pasture assessment and monitoring cannot be implemented with the current dearth of funding and expertise. Whilst over 300 PUUs have been formed nationally, they only exist where IDO projects operate, excluding some of Tajikistan’s most livestock-dependent areas. Different IDOs have employed diverse approaches to both the institutional structure of PUUs and development of pasture management plans, which are required by law but, perhaps more significantly, must be approved before the PUUs receive funding from international donors. Indeed, the importance of IDOs’ implementation of the legislation may even eclipse their role in drafting it.

31Although some longer migrations were affected by loss of state support, in many parts of the country, pasture access and management look much as they did during the Soviet era, with communities continuing to collectively use pasture lands even after they have been privatized on paper, using traditional communal labour systems (hashar) to maintain infrastructure and developing cross-village fodder markets in response to the loss of state provision of fodder. The legislation up to and including the Law on Pastures is perhaps most relevant when imagining future developments rather than understanding the present. Lacking knowledge of ongoing legislative debates and channels to influence legislation, users are most likely to secure access to pasture through negotiations at the district level.

Mongolian debates: pasture reform as key political issue

32In 1994, the Mongolian parliament passed the Land Law, which contained provisions for the regulation and management of pastureland, including leasing of land of up to around 0.5ha around campsites. The working committee consisted of researchers from universities and specialists from the land agency, with little IDO involvement. Implementation of winter campsite leasing started in 2008, four years after the land law was enacted.

34Following three dzud years between 1999 and 2002, during which 30% of the national herd died, an appeal from the Mongolian government led to an influx of aid and of IDOs. Working with herder groups helped donors to reduce transaction costs of aid provision and these were encouraged to register as legal entities, either as NGOs or business cooperatives. Donor organizations working with herding groups, such as the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation, the World Bank and UNDP subsequently took a leading role in the design of legislation on pastures and put these groups at the centre of the draft document which eventually emerged.

35The draft Pastureland Law provides for long-term leases of pastures by herder groups, including members leasing campsites under the 1994 law, and sets out a legal status for these groups. However, defining ‘herding groups’ in Mongolia is problematic [Undargaa 2017]. In initial drafts, groups were formed based on winter pasture use, but in the latest draft of May 2016, one herder can be a member of several different pasture use groups at different times of the year to accommodate seasonal movement patterns. Proponents of the draft suggested that his type of arrangement would maintain flexibility and mobility, yet clearly significant administrative resources would be required to implement and monitor such a system.

36In addition to group user arrangements, a second category – common use – includes reserve, corridor and hay collecting pastures, riparian grazing close to rivers and lakes, and mineral licks. But there is a lack of clarity in the meaning of ‘common use’ and its relation to ‘land use for herder groups’, which may lead to conflicts and accelerate degradation [Fernandez-Giménez and Batbuyan 2004].

38The importance of rangelands to Mongolian culture and history means that any new measure proposing tenure exclusivity is likely generate strong debate in parliament [Himmelsbach 2012]. Attempts were also made to obtain views from herders and a nationwide consultation organized by the Ministry of Food and Agriculture. Herders’ knowledge about the draft Pastureland Law varies. As one rangeland researcher put it: ‘although the Pastureland Law proposal is posted on the Ministry of Food and Agriculture website, I don’t think herders use the internet or send comments’. But generally the consultation found a lack of support for the draft. Many perceive use contracts over pasture (even for groups), as privatization, to be opposed in any form [Fernandez-Giménez and Batbuyan 2004]. They were concerned that such arrangements would undermine essential strategies in arid rangeland management such as mobility and flexibility, which enable herders to access patchy and temporally available resources [Fernandez-Giménez 2002]. This might explain why opposition was particularly strong in the Gobi region, which has the highest variability in pasture resources. Parliament members elected from rural areas tended to fall behind this opposition in order to gain votes.

39Other opponents of the draft Pastureland Law include rangeland researchers, agricultural economists and national NGO representatives, who suggest that it may lead to fragmentation of lands and people and create multiple structures rather solving pasture management issues. These groups, in particular those working in the field and community coordinators of some wildlife conservation organizations, suggest that enforcement of existing laws would be sufficient for pastureland management and propose that region-specific pasture use regulation implemented by nested regulatory institutions could govern mobility between counties and provinces. Meanwhile, taxing livestock would reduce livestock numbers and promote productivity improvements.

Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan – nationally-led processes and state control

40As we have seen, although not always passed into law, IDOs have made key inputs into draft pasture legislation in Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Mongolia. How have these ideas and debates permeated legislation in Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan? These republics, with their oil and gas reserves, are less dependent on outside support; whilst both decentralisation and public involvement in policy are greater in Kazakhstan, in neither republic have these had much influence on pastoral property rights legislation.

46In desert areas, direct relationships between residency, user group membership and physically defined pasture areas are weak and forms of partially open access have emerged in some places. Under these informal arrangements pasture users, although formally identified with the state enterprise in which they live or work, are able in practise to obtain much broader access to grazing across enterprise borders. This may apply to both private and leaseholding livestock herders moving to water points outside their ‘home’ enterprise in response to changing seasonal needs for pasture and water, and density dependant factors [Behnke et al. 2016; Robinson et al. 2015]. These moves are achieved through negotiation between herders themselves, historical precedent and personal relationships with local officials. In areas where relatively free movement is possible, there is now empirical evidence that such arrangements naturally lead to a spatial matching of stocking rates to the forage and water resources available [Behnke et al. 2016].

47This situation, which has arisen without formal property rights for private herders, is the goal of policy makers and rangeland scientists across Central Asia, who generally deplore the mismatch between pasture resources and grazing pressure. But at the same time, livestock numbers are high and growing; overgrazing is perceived to be a serious problem and the now-familiar concentration of livestock owners around larger settlements does also occur in Turkmenistan. The response of governments to such a situation is to attempt some form of regulation.

49The pasture law had to recognise the de facto status of state enterprises as dispensers of pasture use rights, whilst including provisions promoting access for those engaged in collective herding and aimed at avoiding sudden annexation of pastures by a minority. These include the legal possibility for livestock owners to associate and manage pasture in their own right, and provisions for a pasture commission, chaired by local village government, to allocate pasture between private and state users based on a broader planning mechanism. The process of law development was conducted by two international consultants, a national lawyer, and a team of Turkmen researchers who conducted both field research and a consultative process with government departments [Robinson et al. 2015]. The draft was submitted to parliament, where it was amended by a parliamentary committee and adopted in August 2015. The amendments tended towards strengthening of individual property rights for users, and reinforcement of the powers of state enterprises in allocation processes. The eventual impact of the law will depend largely on bylaws, which will define the statutes of PUAs and pasture commissions, and details of pasture allocation procedures. The design of these bylaws is to be conducted through a piloting process in the field.

Actors: international organisations, governments and pasture users

50In all the republics, the initial approach taken to reform was one of pasture privatisation or leasing – an individualisation of property rights. This occurred despite the re-emergence of collective herding systems based on kinship, residence and historical precedent which have been observed in Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan Turkmenistan and Mongolia. It is not clear why this was the case, but certainly the first agrarian reforms experienced in the post-Soviet republics concerned individualisation of rights to arable land, and IDOs were keen to stress the strongest possible forms of tenure security for new farmers. It seems possible that land codes designed with arable reform in mind were simply applied to pastures by default, perhaps hastened by tax-collection requirements, or that the same arguments about security of tenure and investment were seen to apply equally to arable and pasture lands from the start. Certainly, the idea of the tragedy of the commons had been long internalised by Central Asian scientists and policy makers, leading naturally to the idea that individuals must be legally bound to individual parcels of land in order to manage them properly. IDOs have mostly promoted common property regimes, using environmental arguments based on a rather different set of ideas about pastoral systems, stressing the importance of mobility and flexibility.

52But what of the users themselves? They have so far figured little in our narratives of reform, appearing in ‘pilot projects’ and as subjects of the research conducted in the field during preparation of draft reforms, for example in Kyrgyzstan and Turkmenistan. Their influence is apparent in Mongolia, where a legal framework conceived by drafters as CPRM, has been rejected as a form of ‘privatisation for groups’ by herders. Here, consultation appears to have been relatively extensive and some level of political feedback from pasture users was possible through local elections. In this paper, the low number of written local language sources is testament to the problems in transmission of knowledge and ideas from the ground-up.

53In Kazakhstan, there was no political engagement by herders when the leasehold system was introduced during the chaotic 1990s. Livestock owners with large or medium-sized herds who have taken out such contracts with the district authorities or the forestry department would certainly like to see these contracts extended or made permanent [Ferret 2013]. But there has been engagement in other ways. Agribusiness firms have been active in policy formulation at the levels of government. Popular protests have put land code amendments on hold, although these were not focussed on pastures and amalgamated a host of additional concerns. In both Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan and despite the rather different political environments in those two countries, the large number of small livestock owners whose interests would appear to be at odds with privatisation have been politically non-existent at the national level. There have been few organised demands for improved pasture access beyond the village commons, even where collective herding institutions are informally the norm.

55In contrast, herders in Mongolia increasingly acknowledge that growing livestock numbers and declining or unplanned mobility are affecting the pastoral resource [Fernandez-Giménez and Batbuyan 2004]. Herders using pastures which are more productive or close to settled areas, perceive damage to pasture resources to be due to overgrazing by otor livestock from outside [Bruegger et al. 2014]. Thus, on one hand flexibility allows pastoralists to access pastures, but also increases competition for resources, especially if overarching regulatory institutions are weak or absent [Fernandez-Giménez 2002].

56The extent to which IDOs or herders have been able to influence change is intimately bound up with the nature of political regime in place in each country, ranging from relatively open, democratic and decentralised regimes in Mongolia and Kyrgyzstan to the authoritarian state apparatus in Turkmenistan.

An environmental discourse?

57Environmental discourse arising from ideas of the tragedy of the commons, economic theories of private property and concerns over security of tenure, the desire to foster the emergence of a ‘modern’ livestock sector, and interests of large livestock owners with political influence have all been used to promote exclusive property rights over pasture. On the other hand, concerns about ecosystem fragmentation, degradation arising from loss of livestock mobility and social justice, supported by theories of common property economics have tended to favour the promotion of CPRM or more shifting forms of property rights.

58In Central Asia, the reality of informal post-independence pasture management has ranged from something close to common property regimes (such as initially emerged in Kyrgyzstan) to forms of semi-governed open access (as described in the case of Turkmenistan). Such regimes are probably both environmentally and socially appropriate for this arid and spatially variable region of the world, in which a significant part of the livestock inventory is held by large numbers of smallholders.

59However although such arguments have been promoted by IDOs, legal frameworks based on individual tenure are more familiar to national policy makers, lawyers and researchers. This can be traced to their immediate experiences of arable land reform and the perception that private property rights and the associated ‘ranching’ form of pastoralism are modern and more productive. There is also some concern amongst these actors that herders without legally secure tenure would be at risk. In a low-trust environment, with little experience of democratic institutions, to believe that long-term security of access might be available within common property institutions constitutes a leap of faith which few in Central Asia are prepared to countenance. The question of whether low levels of individual investment, perceived by national policy makers to be a risk under CPRM, could be made up for by investments by (potentially corrupt) pasture management institutions, is also a concern.

60Environmental concerns are bound up with institutional structures. From the state’s point of view, regulation, control and taxation are part of its mandate and all are facilitated by private property regimes. There is a widespread assumption that only enforced adherence to carrying capacity regulations can assure the sustainable management of pastures for generations to come and that this would be easier to enforce under a private property or leasehold system.

63Yet, there is a growing body of evidence that herders are rational actors. Recent research has shown that where costs (whether social, economic or administrative) to movement are low, herders respond by matching stocking rates to the availability of those resources which they consider of primary importance, and which may include water as well as forage [Behnke et al. 2016; Moritz et al. 2014; Scholte et al. 2006]. Where such matching is not occurring, a suite of biological and economic trade-offs influence decision making in a statistically predictable – and thus rational manner [Kerven et al. 2016a; Kraudzun 2012; Robinson et al. 2016, 2017].

64So where does this leave our environmental discourse? Such a discourse is used by both IDOs and governments to present the problem – which is usually that pastures are degraded. However, both the reasons given: which may be reduced to a ‘tragedy of the commons’ type discourse, and arguments focussing on issues of ecological fragmentation and livestock mobility are quite different. The resulting solutions – forms of individual property rights or regimes based on CPRM – are diametrically opposed. Pasture users appear perhaps less concerned with degradation in itself, but may employ environmental arguments to achieve their aims, which are essentially pasture access. This phenomenon of groups invoking international environmental discourses for local political ends can be seen elsewhere [e.g. Sundberg 1998]. As we have seen however, the pastoralist community in Central Asia is highly heterogeneous and lacks a unified agenda. For smaller owners, forms of common property may be in their interest, but these livestock owners tend to be unaware of formal examples of these elsewhere, and are in any case unrepresented. IDOs attempt to represent the supposed interests of these users, but must in effect do so without them, as they participate so little in the process. There is little evidence so far that larger livestock owners with stand-alone herds would lose out in a common property regime, but they are unlikely to specifically promote such a system as they prefer the control associated with exclusive individual rights. Such groups tend to be better connected and informed both legally and politically.

65Central Asian policy makers would have to be convinced that the forms of pasture management and allocation likely to emerge under CPRM would be sufficiently representative, protective of user rights and amenable to control, to prefer such a system over the certainties of leasing or private property arrangements. They would have to be aware of the scientific evidence for negative impacts of such tenure systems on poorly productive heterogeneous rangelands. Much depends on the ability to compare the relative benefits of different systems in context. It has been suggested that promotion of CPRM by IDOs is rather naïve, because communities are heterogeneous and elites likely to gain preferential access to pasture [Dörre 2015; Jacquesson 2010]. However, wealth disparities exist in all common property systems, some of which have endured for centuries [Ostrom 1990; Stevenson 1991]. There is not yet any evidence that inequalities of access under CPRM in Kyrgyzstan system are any greater than those associated with the leasing system which came before it, or a system of private property, which would make such disparities permanent.

66R. Neudert [2015] suggests that exclusive tenure rights are compatible with mobile pastoralism and that binary categories of exclusive individual or communal tenure may not cover the range of institutional possibilities available. Certainly in Azerbaijan the leasing system described by the author has not inhibited transhumant systems and in Kazakhstan many of the larger livestock owners are increasingly mobile and able to acquire access arrangements in different seasonal pastures [Ferret 2013; Kerven et al. 2016b]. However, in both of these cases mobility concerns livestock owners having several hundred sheep equivalents, whilst smaller owners remain clustered around settlements all year around. In much of Central Asia, the discussion around mobility and tenure systems often concerns precisely these smaller owners, who are numerous and collectively own a large proportion (or even the majority) of national inventories [Robinson et al. 2012]. Whilst some in this category use collective herding mechanisms to achieve high levels of mobility, others do not, particularly in Kazakhstan where they are largely sedentary (although the reasons for this may be as much economic and social as related to the tenure system [Kerven et al. 2016b]).

67In both Kazakhstan and Tajikistan, in areas where pressure on pastures is low, some users currently gain informal access to pastures through relationships with leaseholders or their shepherds, and other semi-legal collective arrangements. But a leasing system is only likely to provide groups of small owners with formal access to remote pastures if: (i) it includes the possibility to conclude group contracts; (ii) allocation procedures are made on some basis other than ‘first come first serve’; (iv) leasing periods are short and (iii) transaction costs of land registration low. We are not aware of any such system currently working in practice, although attempts have been made to include some of these elements in the new Turkmen law.

69Incremental change is perhaps easier where a basic framework for common property management is in place, which could facilitate emergence of multiple forms of pasture user groups and governance systems. In France and Switzerland, transhumant systems bear many parallels to those of mountainous parts of Central Asia, and, as in Kyrgyzstan, pastures are allocated to local government and managed by users. The common and fundamental basis for primary user rights is based on residency and inscribed in law, but user groups formed and organized in different ways over a long period of time, each with its own rules regarding secondary membership rights, exclusion and reciprocity and fees [Eychenne 2006; Stevenson 1991]. In order for even such a loose system to work, minimum conditions had to include a ban on private property, a universal definition or understanding of primary user rights backed by the state, and government-supported mechanisms for conflict resolution and pasture access across administrative boundaries. In Mongolia, where spatial and social boundaries for managing pastoral commons are vague and permeable, such higher level institutions may be particularly important. Although experiences from donor supported herder groups have produced some positive social outcomes [Fernandez-Giménez et al. 2015 ; Upton 2008], there is less evidence for positive ecological outcomes. Vegetation and soil studies were conducted on winter grazing pastures of paired districts with formal CBRM and non-CBRM groups. Of between 64 and 71 test comparisons at sites in four ecological zones, only 5-9% showed significant differences concerning vegetation biomass and cover, species richness and diversity, soil surface characteristics, vegetation forage quality or palatability [Chantsallkham 2015]. The herder group approach alone, where groups are small and boundaries undefined, may not be sufficient in managing arid rangelands without forms of institutional regulation at higher levels.

Conclusion

71To conclude, we find that environmental discourse somewhat misses the heart of the problems of pasture property rights regimes; opposing discourses have been used by IDOs and local policy makers to promote completely different tenure systems. The arguments that truly concern resource users centre upon the type of regime that best enables them to maximise benefits from those livestock which they own, not maintain pasture condition per se. Of course, these aims are often aligned, but in some cases, neither is attained, at least for a subset of users. In such cases, it is common to suppose that users must be ‘made’ to manage their pastures properly either through controlled leasing or through training and pasture planning. But it is increasingly understood that herders react to environmental, social and economic circumstances in statistically predictable ways, suggesting that decision making is a response to constraints and not a lack of knowledge or planning. The search for improved legal frameworks is certainly important in this respect, but as we have seen, the introduction of new ideas is extremely difficult. Central Asian policy makers and scientists could be encouraged to consider informal practises in their own countries as potential starting points for legislative development, and to assess potential options in the context of regimes in place elsewhere, according to their environmental and social implications. More broadly, policy should focus less on monitoring of pasture condition, control, regulation and institutional micro-management, and more on understanding and reducing the constraints to pasture access and livestock mobility, whether these be legal, administrative or economic.