State Policy and Pasture Degradation in Inner Asia

The pastoralists of the Inner Asian grassland have been administered in different ways by Russian, Mongolian and Chinese governments. A Cambridge-based international research project set out to compare the results of these various approaches in the light of the widespread pastoral degradation reported in Chinese and Russian parts of the region. The findings suggest that areas, such as Mongolia, which have retained mobile pastorialism have much lower levels of reported pastoral degradation than those that introduced static, highly-mechanised agro-industrial techniques.