In Mongolia the debate over the ownership of land has become one of the most controversial political issues in the recent history of this post-socialist state. The introduction of laws that would allow, for the first time, the private ownership of land has provoked heated discussion in a nation that continues to construct its identity with reference to ancient traditions of mobile pastoralism.

In the early 1990s, in the wake of the collapse of Soviet-backed state socialism, the Mongolian state undertook wholesale political and economic reform. A multiparty electoral system was introduced, and although the old ‘communist’ ruling party (the Mongolian People's Revolutionary Party, MPRP) was confirmed in office, the state nevertheless embraced a broadly liberal agenda. The government embarked on a series of radical reforms designed to create a market economy. In common with other Soviet-block countries, the Western economic advice given to Mongolia resembled the stabilization and structural reform packages that the IMF and the World Bank recommended for poor countries in the 1970s and 1980s (Nolan 1995: 75). It included the privatization of public assets, price liberalization, cutting state subsidies and expenditure, currency convertibility, and the rapid introduction of markets. The recommendations reflected a neoliberal discourse in which the economy should be emancipated from the political structure, permitted to assume its latent ‘natural’ form, composed of private property and the market.

In 1991 Mongolia began a huge programme to privatize collective and state enterprises (Asian Development Bank 1992: 86-88, World Bank 1994: 9). In rural districts the reforms included the dissolution of the pastoral collectives (negdel) and most of the state farms (sangiin aj akhui). The collective herds of sheep, goats, cattle, horses and in some regions camels, were divided between the former members, as were the other collective assets such as motor vehicles, machinery and equipment.

The introduction of the new proprietary regime had the effect of breaking up the concentrated herd ownership, the large-scale movement systems and specialist support operations the collectives had organized. Many of the workers in the rural settlements lost their jobs but gained some livestock instead. This trebled the number of workers directly reliant on pastoralism for their livelihood from less that 18% of the national workforce in 1989 to 50% of the working population in 1998 (National Statistical Office of Mongolia 1999: 95 and 45, Statistical Office of Mongolia 1993: 6).