Ruins in the making: socio-spatial struggles over extraction and export in the Sino-Mongolian Borderlands

ABSTRACT Mongolia’s fabulous mineral wealth has led to competition and conflict amongst multiple stakeholders. Here we examine local struggles over extraction and export in the Sino-Mongolia Borderlands to offer a perspective on contemporary rural governance transformations in mining frontiers. Grounding years of in-country research with in-depth participant insights, we present and analyze the dilemmas faced by local government actors in Mongolia’s Gobi mining belt in order to problematize the dichotomy between conflict or cooperation on the steppe. Given the fleeting and inherently environmentally destructive nature of open-pit mineral extraction on land traditionally used by mobile pastoralists, how do local authorities negotiate for a better future for their locality and constituents? Drawing inspiration from theoretical work on ruination, we highlight the material and spatial elements of contestations over land, territory and development. By leveraging laws related to environmental protection, bureaucratic procedures and corporate social responsibility, local authorities have found creative ways to slow down the physical destruction of their lands from mineral extraction, salvage space for traditional livelihoods and capture benefits for local investment. These forms of institutional resistance, however, reveal the weakening of local institutions in rural governance as local authorities and citizens are excluded from large-scale development decision-making processes.


Introduction
If we keep standing still, we will go back empty handed.We will leave empty handed now.We came here for nothing.We are paid for each trip.If we stay put, we won't get paid and if we keep driving, we will get paid (Gurvantes, May 2019).
A Mongolian truck driver, stuck at a protest roadblock in the rural county of Gurvantes (Figure 1) in Unmugovi province, described his tenuous situation in the spring of 2019.The truck driver himself was originally from the city of Darkhan (Figure 1) and once worked as a driver for a state-owned cement factory during the socialist period.The cement company was privatized during Mongolia's period of structural reforms, and later closed.He was accompanied by a second driver from northern Khuvsgul province.Neither man owned the trucks they drove; they were subcontractors of a truck company.Their duties involved loading coal into the trucks at the mine site, and dropping the load at an unloading point at the border.His was one of many trucks carrying mineral cargo that was forced to stop at this point on a long road to the Chinese border.A company constructing a short portion of road from a mine site in Gurvantes to the main border route allegedly had not received regular payment over the course of two years of work.The road company created the roadblock to leverage the mine to pay for the road construction.This particular road had also been the stage for protests by local herders who were dissatisfied with the dust and disturbances created by the heavy export truck traffic in the area.Such disputes, which go largely unreported in the national and international media, highlight the complexity of mining politics in rural areas and disrupt singular narratives of extraction-based "national development" more broadly.
Conflicts spill onto the roads not only in Gurvantes, but across Mongolia's many mining sites (Jackson 2015a).However, not all conflicts are public and dramatically staged.Many are intensely personal and private for local decisionmakers, herders and residents who find ways to protect and bring benefits to their homelands while witnessing the permanent material transformations of these places into sites of extraction and export.As the opening vignette of this article illustrates, conflicts reveal complex and competing relationships between companies involved in different aspects of extraction and export, from road building to coal transport, beyond a single mine site.Focusing on empirical material from Omnogovi and Sukhbaatar provinces, we highlight how extraction-based development visions writ large in the Sino-Mongolian Borderlands involve continual struggles over environmental governance, local selfdetermination and decision making and the extent of local institutional power.County level (soum) government and provincial authorities provide an entry point to understand the everyday negotiations over land, place and the meaning of development occurring in this region.
Today, Mongolia's Gobi Borderlands are in a state of significant socio-spatial transformation, induced by the country's mineral wealth (estimated at more than US$1 trillion) located at the threshold of China's economy (World Bank 2020).In December 2020, the number of mining licenses in Mongolia reached 2,692 (37.6% exploration and 62.3% exploitation) (MPRAM 2020).The great majority of licenses were issued starting in the early 2000s.Today some rural counties have up to 80% of the territory enclosed by mines (Tegshbayar 2021).China's demand for coal from its northern neighbor has only increased in the context of wider geopolitical contentions (IEA 2021) and Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) alliances.In 2016, roughly 86% of Mongolia's exports consisted of minerals, stones and precious metals, with approximately 79% of exports transported across the Southern border to China (ADB 2018, 4-5).The piecemeal labor of removing and moving minerals at this scale has transformed the Gobi provinces, with roads and service stations hastily constructed to serve the single pursuit of maximizing export.
Ruins in the Making, the title of this article, speaks to the contradiction presented by extraction as both a form of material destruction and physical ruination of rural pastoral landscapes and as a celebrated means of development by the national government.The material effects of extractive realities reframes the basis of the Mongolia's rural economy of mobile pastoralism, which requires mobility as a key livelihood strategy to access shared resources such as water and pasture.Though constitutionally land is state-owned, mine licenses prevail over customary tenure.Mining infrastructure leads to the fragmentation of extensive grasslands essential for pastoralism and reorients conceptions of rural livelihoods toward industrial wage labor.A road or a fence restricts livestock grazing, can block access to water and disturb customary land tenure with cascading effects.Widely-practiced artisanal mining goes from being a small-scale source of income to a prohibited activity.Thus the lives of countryside Mongolians, with limited technical skills for intensive large-scale mining, are frustrated by the quest for national benefit and revenue.A customary camp, autumn otor (long-distance) grazing to fatten livestock or a rare spring are sacrificed to a grand promise and mining license issued in the capital city.Rural governments confront these contradictions and constraints in a range of creative ways, despite limited power and capacity.
Our analysis in this paper deliberately focuses on the perspectives of local government authorities.Challenges faced by herders should not go unmentioned; our fieldwork revealed serious concerns regarding practices of forced resettlement and compensation of herders by mining companies across all of our fieldsites.However, these issues remain beyond the scope of the paper and are addressed elsewhere (Ahearn and Namsrai 2021).The many mines that exist in Mongolia have diverse corporate cultures and ways of relating to local governments.Here we want to complicate popular imaginations of "conflict" as primarily characterized by public confrontations or protest -indeed; most local disputes and dilemmas remain invisible and go largely unreported.Likewise, we highlight and unpack the actions of local governments and public administrators which deserve more attention in analysis of mining development and conflict in Mongolia.We highlight rather more subtle forms of resistance to mineral extraction within existing institutions, even if these efforts ultimately fail, to further explicate how local actors attempt to retain the material and territorial integrity of their homelands.

Researching conflict dynamics
This paper emerges from the wider Gobi Framework research project (2018-2021), which focused on understanding the nature of conflicts and controversies surrounding local mine development in Mongolia and Kyrgyzstan.In this paper, we will focus on three counties (soum) in Mongolia, including Gurvantes soum in Umnugobi province, and Sukhbaatar soum and Erdenetsagaan soum of Sukhbaatar province.While mining operations exist across Mongolia, our analysis focuses on Umnugobi and Sukhbaatar provinces.Umnugobi is one of Mongolia's biggest provinces and home to significant mineral development.Additionally, we chose Sukhbaatar province as a research site because of the presence of the large Chinese-Mongolian Tsairt Minerals Company and to establish a comparison with an eastern province.Three of the primary border crossings for mineral export between Mongolian and China are in these provinces, including Shivee Khuren and Gashuun Sukhait (Umnugobi) and Bichigt (Sukhbaatar).These are key sites for the export of iron ore, coal, copper concentrate, and crude oil (ADB 2018), mainly by road transport.
For the Mongolia fieldsites, research was conducted jointly between the authors and a Mongolia-based team (consisting of the project Co-I and research assistants).Interviews and focus groups were the primary forms of data collection.Participants were recruited on the basis of their role and were "cold" contacted during in-person field visits.Out the twenty-two local government authorities that we interviewed, only one was a woman.We did not specifically analyze the impacts of this gender inbalance or gendered nuances in their interview responses; however, this is an area for future research.We have chosen to anonymize the quotes and descriptions of interviewee job titles in the text in later sections in order to protect the identities of participants.
The breakdown of the interviews and locations are listed in the table below: All of the interviews and focus groups were conducted in the Mongolian language and were transcribed into Mongolian language files.These files were translated into English.Both English and Mongolia language transcripts were coded using NVivo 12. Coding in both languages allowed us to capture idioms and metaphors which are difficult to accurately and meaningfully translate into English.
As stated earlier, we focus primarily on data from local county (soum) government officials for this article.Soum administrative districts are equivalent to a "county" and nested within a province.A bag is nested within a soum and represents the smallest sub-district in rural Mongolia.Soum government offices tend to be small; for example Gurvantes has 30 permanent staff under the following department heads: Citizen's Representative Council, Governor's office, Agriculture, Veterinary, Environment, Finance, Tax and Social Welfare, and Bag Governors (see www.omnogovi.gov.mn/gurvantes/zdtg).The soum governor and bag governor are elected in democratic elections.Other government administrators are meant to be selected through competitive job applications based on merit.
"Government stakeholders" are often lumped together as a group in discussions of resistance to extractivism.We find value in probing the nuances offered by authorities with the closest spatial proximity to sites of mineral extraction and export.Interviews focused on how individuals articulate their role and responsibilities, relationships with local citizens, governance issues and the impacts of mining in their region.Although local governments are faced with the task of implementing national law at the local level, the power and capacity of these offices to regulate multiple large scale mining operations over an extensive territory is limited.The majority of soum government authorities are responsible for overseeing land use and local resident (including herder) welfare concerns; the offices do not normally have a specialized desk for mining-related issues.The structure of the local government in many ways continues to reflect the socialist era rural economy, when collectivized livestock husbandry was the dominant economic activity.Local governments are responsible for everything from organizing the local Naadam holiday summer festivities to the bi-annual livestock census, to investigating criminal activities ranging from petty theft to illegal wildlife hunting.In case of Gurvantes, the soum government is responsible for oversight over a very large territory -a total of 27,970 km 2 , nearly the size of Belgium.Omnogovi province and Sukhbaatar province have a diverse range of mines in terms of minerals, investment arrangements, and scale.

Gurvantes, Omnogovi Province
According to the soum governor of Gurvantes, the county had one of the largest populations of people and livestock and ranked highly in Mongolia's human development index during the last years of the socialist era and early 1990s.
Prior to the establishment of mining in the soum in the early 2000s, development was tied to the price of cashmere which was exported at high prices in the late 1990s.Similar to Sukhbaatar soum in Sukhbaatar province, few mining companies were established in Gurvantes before the mid 1990s.The mining in this region consists of a patchwork of international investments (joint ventures, private Mongolian companies and foreign investment) operating at a range of scales.Additionally, this region is a site of artisanal gold mining (Mijiddorj et al 2019).The EITI, (2018) indicates a total of 36 mining licenses issued to 24 companies in the soum.Eighteen of the licenses are for coal and the remaining are for salt, gold, copper, agalmatolite, zinc, jasper, crude oil and construction materials.The electricity supply to Gurvantes soum is enabled by the Chinkhua-Mak Mine, a Chinese-Mongolian joint venure, which imports electricity from China (Mijiddorg and Purevsuren, 2021).

Sukhbaatar and Erdenetsagaan, Sukhbaatar Province
Our team did supplementary research in Sukhbaatar soum and Erdentsagaan soum (the province has 13 soum in total) of Sukhbaatar province (Figure 1).In all of the fieldsite locations, mobile pastoralism is still widely practiced around the mine sites and across the rural landscape.Rural land is state owned and managed by soum authorities according to customary forms of mobile land tenure; legally herders can obtain exclusive rights to possess winter and spring camps (often the site of livestock shelters and corrals) (see also Sneath 2001;Fernandez-Gimenez 2002;Fernandez-Gimenez and Batjav 2004).All rural land can be used to pasture livestock, though ground cover, vegetation and water varies significantly across the country.Sukhbaatar soum is nationally known as an important area for horse herds and race horse training; locals explained that wealthy Mongolians including some politicians keep their horse herds with hired herders not far from the provincial center of Sukhbaatar province.

Thinking with Ruins: Socio-spatial struggles in globally expanding mining frontiers
Work on globally expanding mining frontiers has highlighted the severity and pervasiveness of land acquisition/grabbing of the commons by corporate and state actors (Dell'Angelo et al 2017).A warming planet and advances in technology are enabling extraction to occur in places formerly inaccessible, such as the Arctic and sub-Arctic regions (Eliasson et al. 2017).These expanding frontiers demarcate rural and remote areas as sites of raw material critical for global economic production as well as technologies to enable the carbon transition (Chilombo 2021) (i.e.copper, litium, rare earth minerals, strong wind and sun resources).Raw material extraction in these areas often depends on the creation of new infrastructure to enable labor mobility, export of materials, telecommunication services, and connection to energy sources.These developments have transformative effects on land use, governance and socio-political subjectivities (Frederiksen and Himley 2020).
In this sense, mines become nodes from which new connections and geopolitical dependences are built and extended; in Mongolia, for example, grid interconnection with Russia and China are envisioned as part of extractive expansion.Likewise, while there is a great diversity of investment in Mongolia's extractive sector, China's demand for minerals makes it an easy commodity to trade and frame within the Belt and Road Initative's (BRI) philosophy of "shared benefits."The Mongolian Steppe Road programme, Mongolia's part of the Russia-Mongolia-China Belt and Road Corridor, highlights the importance of developing the the extractive and energy sector (LegalInfo 2019a).Expansions of border crossings including a new free economic zone on the Zamyn-Uud crossing reflects broader transformations in the region.These priorities are also reflected in China and Mongolia's Comprehensive Strategic Partnership which was further commemorated in April 2019 (Communique, Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the People's Republic of China).Mineral export and production are fueling China's development of its border regions (Woodworth 2019), and the infrastructure built to facilitate extraction on the Mongolian side of the border is interwoven with these powerful geopolitical pressures (see also Jackson and Dear 2016).As Reeves (2014) has pointed out in the post-Soviet context, by paying attention to the histories and liveliness of infrastructure, including how it might be appropriated by unexpected groups, we can advance understandings of contemporary state spatializations and territorial contestations.In this context, expanding mining frontiers in the Gobi involves an approach to infrastructure and the Mongolia-China border which contrasts from the formerly dominant rural economic form of mobile pastoralism.
In addition to new forms of connectivity, extractive projects in expanding mining frontiers are associated with land and agrarian dispossession (Kuyek 2019).Lands grabbed, enclosed and commercialized for mining industrial purposes are often public or state lands, conservation areas or traditional territories of Indigenous and mobile pastoralist societies as well as marginalized agriculture-based societies.The Lake Turkana Wind Farm, which acquired 150,000 hectares of customary mobile pastoralist lands from the Kenyan Trust Land for the construction of 365 wind turbines (Achiba 2019), is one of many recent examples where huge tracts of land formerly designated as "marginal" (due to their aridity or low agricultural production value) (Chilombo 2021) or borderland areas have been transferred to company control.In many cases, these lands have been classified as wastelands, for example in the case of India (Yenneti et al 2016), despite the long-standing presence and use of these areas by smallholders and traditional agrarian groups.Such projects are promoted as critical to national development, the green transition or as sources of employment, often closing off avenues for public deliberation and genunine local stakeholder engagement in what these developments may mean in practice.Both Chilombo (2021) and Yenneti et al. (2016) highlight the complex local power dynamics, politics and impacts on social cohesion which are provoked by land acquisition and the creation of industrialized landscapes in these contexts.
Jackson's sensitive analysis of the Oyu Tolgoi mine and the surrounding region (2015a, 2015b, 2018) provides an entry point to understand the political ecology of mining and socio-spatial transformations in the Gobi region to supplement these global studies.Examining the production and presence of dust from mining processes and unpaved roads, Jackson (2015, 96) argues that what dust "creates is an unintentional form of enclosure"; the production of dust from mining-related development and export changes relations with place, home, livestock and personal health.She writes, "the dust signifies changing visions of land use that are perceived to materially exclude nomadic herders as unpaved mining roads proliferate.Dust thus marks boundaries of change as dust from livestock and wildlife evokes fertile landscapes while dust from vehicles suggests the increasing sterility of the pasture as mining dominates local life" (101).In a related topic, she has examined controversies over water use in the Gobi and herder contentions that Oyu Tolgoi threatens Gobi water supplies.Here she highlights how controversies surrounding mining reflect wider neglect of pastoral livelihoods, traditional water sources and the water infrastructures they rely on.The national and corporate "consolidation of water for mineral extraction" (Jackson 2018, 337) not only transforms, encloses and occupies land formerly used for herding but disregards the failing Soviet-era infrastructure of wells, veterinary services and service provision once available to herders.
Building on this work, we also observe that the particular materiality of mineral extraction not only takes land out of use, but involves radical disruption of the existing landscape through the engineering of gigantic open pits and overburden heaps.Unlike prior socialist era mining enterprises, contemporary mine sites are not designed to be permanently inhabited and the majority of workers "fly-in and fly-out" to distant cities. Work schedules consisting of two weeks of intensive work and two weeks off encourage these monthly migrations back and forth to the mines.Degraded environments, tailing ponds and fears over contaminated water further impede habitation.The expansion of mining has rendered the countryside an expanding terra nullius, both in operating on the false assumption that the land is up for grabs and ultimately, in the creation of uninhabitable, mined landscapes for livestock and human alike.Guzman-Gallegos (2019, 53) similarily refers to oil extraction as creating "landcapes of scattered debris" in the Peruvian Amazon.Here Stoler's (2008) work on ruination is a helpful analytical lens.She uses this term as both a noun and a verb to highlight not only the politics of dispossession and experiences of loss but also the places which remain and continue to be lived in following great alterations of landscapes from such events as war, environmental disaster and pollution, forced population displacement and neglect.She writes, "Large scale ruin making takes resources and planning that may involve the forced removal of populations and new zones of uninhabitable space, reassigning inhabitable space, and dictating how people are supposed to live in them.As such, these ruin-making endeavors are typically state projects, ones that are often strategic, nation-building and politically charged" (202)."Ruination" as a type of heuristic device helps us to critically reflect on the meaning of mining as a form of development.Ruination draws attention to the politics of infrastructure and contestations over development (Mukherjee 2017).It points us to examine how local people make sense of and engage with the forms of ruination happening around them.
In a similar vein, Reinert (2018) examines the "sacrificial logics" at play in the politics surrounding a copper mine slated for development in Sami lands of the Norwegian arctic.This sacrificial logic involves the understanding or hope held by local people that in exchange for the destruction of something (in this case Indigenous land), a greater reward will lie in the future.The rendering of extraction in terms of economic value, both in terms of environmental losses and economic gains, conceals the visibility of the destruction of land and frames extraction as a moral imperative of "sacrifice".The local community opposition to mining in Reiner's study and efforts of the local mayor to secure mine commitments to local development were met with resistance and moral posturing from central government authorities.As Reinart so effectively illustrates, the logic of the sacrifice is such that the future reward may never be realized -"capitalist time become legible as a continuous, hopeful destruction of the present -a conflagration in which everything burns, for the sake of a future that destroys itself in the fulfillment of its own conditions" (615).
Such contradictions between promised development or benefit and the reality of conditions on the ground has also been examined from a more strictly economic point of view.A study by Ansar and his colleagues (Ansar et al. 2016) revealed that more than half of Chinese infrastructure investments in a 30-year time frame were economic duds and have destroyed rather than created economic value.While infrastructure is a powerful symbol of development utilized by state actors, the effects are contradictory.Prior forms of connectivity and mobility may be fractured (Bennett 2020), and new infrastructure may become unusable or obsolete (e.g.ghost cities in China, see Sorace and Hurst 2016 or housing speculation DeSilvey and Edensor 2012).
These extractivist and developmental projects have been met with various forms of resistance, both formal and informal (Prause and Le Billon 2020), manifesting in a range of ways (Lander et al. 2021).Sändig's (2021) analysis of 46 studies of resistance to large-scale land acquisition in the agricultural sector revealed three main typologies of resistance, ranging from everyday actions such as sabatoge or foot dragging to confrontational actions including protests and road blockages to more formal and legal strategies.Interestingly, Sändig points out that in nearly all cases examined in the study, the interests of state actors and investing companies aligned, with state actors facilitating land acquisition.However, the involvement of local leaders, including what we might classify as lower-level government administrators or civil servants, in resistance actions was a critical element in many cases.This reveals nuanced political positioning in relation to the actions of local government.Myadar and Jackson (2019) discuss the rise of populism and resource nationalism as an expression of resistance and public discontentment in Mongolia in the 2017 presidential campaign, revealing the complex ways in which resource politics manifests and becomes entangled with ideas of ethnic identity and national sovereignty.Our paper speaks to these themes and attemps to understand the actions of local government authorities in response to extractive development in their territories, who often have close familial ties with the soum or province that they live and work in.However, we do not attempt to explain the actions of Mongolian national politicians or bureaucrats or offer a fresh analysis of neoliberal development and the mining sector in Mongolia.That has been done extensively by others (Bumochir 2020;Lander 2019;Hatcher 2014).Rather we attempt to shed light on the perhaps less visible negotiations at play in the local government office, as the business of extraction and export unfolds in regions accustomed to managing a livestock-based pastoralist economy.

Local Government Negotiations and Resistance
Our analysis here focuses mainly on the dilemmas and contestations over mining occurring at the local level, the role of local government authorities and how they negotiate power dynamics between mining companies, provincial authorities, the state, and local herders.What emerges from the analysis is the delicate dance of local government with companies operating in their territory, the central government, local citizens and the law broadly conceived.While local authorities are given very little power over mine licensing processes, they do have some space to interpret and implement law at the local level.Interviews with soum authorities, mine management and local herders in our fieldsites revealed a number of spaces for local government to act.They largely clustered around environmental protection, road-building and infrastructure, legal gaps and securing commitments for local investment from mining companies as a form of corporate social responsibility.The common dilemmas faced by many of the soum authorities was striking, especially given the distance between Sukhbaatar and Umnugobi provinces and the different characteristics of mines and minerals extracted in each region.
In both regions, mining development began with the establishment of one significant mine.In the case of Sukhbaatar, it was Tsairt Mineral (zinc) and in Gurvantes it was the development of the Nariin Sukhait (coal) deposit by the Mak and Chinhua-Mak companies.Both mines feature Mongolian-Chinese joint ventures and are considered to be deposits of national "strategic importance" (EITI 2018, 49).At the time of writing, the Nariin Sukhait deposit was being extracted by multiple companies.In Gurvantes, the soum governor described the early period of mine development, when the prospect of a mine coming to the county was imagined by local residents as an exciting economic development opportunity -"They used to cheer and almost shout and riot to enable the mine to operate [laughing]" (April 2019).This atmosphere quickly changed as mines in the county proliferated over the 2000s.

Environmental protection as proxy for traditional land tenure
Soum authorities in our case study sites used similar techniques to protect their territories and prevent mine licensing, despite having limited authority to do so.Environmental protection has been an important element in the social mobilization against mining in Mongolia (see for example Upton 2014;Byambajav 2015), perhaps because laws and regulations on environmental protection and safeguarding are developed to a much greater extent than laws on social safeguarding.For example, the Law on Environmental Impact Assessment has been implemented since 1998 (revised in 2001 and 2012) while guidelines on Social Impact Assessment and Health Impact assessment are yet to be approved (Byambaa and de Vries 2020; Tsogtbaatar, Wagler and Janes 2014; Purevsuren et al. 2021).The Mongolian Government does not have laws on resettlement from mine license areas, and the Law on Minerals includes a vague reference requiring companies to provide compensation for households forced to move from their winter camps.
Here the gap between international investor compliance standards such as the IFC Performance Standards and the many mines without such requirements is stark.Issues of forced resettlement of herders from exclusion zones has appeared in local courts with regards to compensation (Ahearn and Bayarsaikhan 2021).We were told by a soum land officer that "Herder interests are not protected by laws on environment, water and land.We check the rehabilitation and if we establish that they [companies] are not negatively affecting the environment on that land then they can proceed with their operation." Processes of Free, Prior and Informed Consent (FPIC) are not applied in Mongolia, as herders are considered to be traditional but not Indigenous (for further discussion in relation to Oyu Tolgoi, see Jackson 2015b), as is the case with many mobile pastoralist groups across the Middle East and Central Asia.The mineral licensing process includes a stipulation that a citizen's bag (subdistrict) meeting must be held as part of the environmental impact assessment process.A soum governor explained in June 2019, "Prior to starting the operation they have the environmental impact assessment and feasibility study and many such things approved.They must have it discussed in an allcitizens bag meeting.They must give information about that.They don't do that in advance, they organize a discussion after they receive their license, which is weird.It is better to have it discussed in an all-citizens bag meeting.They are coming after obtaining their license and organizing a discussion about whether it is right for them to operate or not.It is already decided by that time." This process for citizen consultation during the issuing of mining licenses is contradictory and confusing.Tegshbayar (2021) identified the murky practices regarding local consultation surrounding licenses, which has led to violations in herder property rights and local land management plans.She points out that the issuance of land tenure certificates to herders for winter and spring camps for periods up to 40 years and beyond, which could be compared to a land use license similar to mining, is disregarded and mine licensing prioritized.Herder winter and spring camp certificates are issued by soum authorities, whereas mining licenses are issues by central government authorities.The practice we observed at mining sites is that herders are forced to move after being offered some form of compensation by companies.These "compensation" giving practices are unregulated and go unchecked though come into the purview of local government when complaints between herders and companies escalate.
Soum authorities have little power over the issuing of licenses in their soum but everyday environmental governance and implementation of the law is in their field of action.In this sense, in the absence of laws explicitly protecting herder land tenure and rights to practice traditional livelihoods, environmental protection becomes one legal avenue for local areas to be protected from licenses.An authority in a soum office in one of our fieldsites explained that the local soum citizen's representative council has started to resolve conflicts surrounding mining licenses by creating locally protected areas within the soum, "After the area is approved as a protected area, it is seen as an overlap [with a mine license] on the map, which causes a hiatus [in the licensing process].Also, the same goes for the aimag [province] as they get some areas [to be designated] as a protected area of the aimag" (June 2019).
According to Mijiddorj and Purevsuren (2021), land can be designated by the soum for "local special needs" for a five year period according to the Law on Minerals.They discuss the efforts of the Snow Leopard Conservation Foundation, local government and herders in Tost bag of Gurvantes to create the State Tos Tosonbumba Nature Reserve to protect snow leopard habitat in the stark mountains of the area.The effort appeared to be a victory until a major scandal erupted in 2019 when it was alleged that false documents were produced and the boundaries of the National Reserve were altered in order to accommodate the license area of a major mine in Gurvantes, South Gobi Coal Trans, owned by a Mongolian Member of Parliament.A major press conference was held during our fieldwork in May 2019, which by summer 2019 escalated to national, fully televised political crisis.On 14 th August 2019, government resolution 319 (LegalInfo 2019b) was issued to re-define the boundaries of Tos Tosonbumba, register the new reserve boundary coordinates into the national database and investigate the possibility of putting all of the Tost and Tosonbum Mountain ranges into special state protection, thereby freezing mining activity in the area.
In Sukhbaatar, a serious issue emerged when Tsairt began exploration around a local sacred mountain and ovoo called Sangiin ovoo in 2014.Soum authorities reported to us that Buddhist monks sat in the bucket of the mining excavator as a form of protest.According to them, a legal battle ensued and was brought to the Mongolian courts.Using a legal argument on freedom of religion, the protesting party won and the exploration close to the sacred site was suspended.It is notoriously difficult to suspend a mining license after it has been issued (Kuyek 2019) and companies sink money into exploration processes.Here we have found that in the absence of local consent or participation in mining development decision-making, the designation of environmental protection zones may be one pathway for self-determination, though it is flawed and temporary.This resonates with Byambabaatar Ichinkhorloo's (2017) work, which discusses how Mongolian notions of the environment in the broader sense of nutag (homeland)-based collective identities is central to pastoralist territoriality.The use of environmental protection as a proxy for traditional land tenure and to ward against mining development demonstrates the weakness of herder land rights and local control over land use given the power of central government authorities in deciding the trajectory of new mineral development.

Bureaucratic methods for self-determination
Central Government Ministries, in accordance with Mongolia's liberal mining law, become the centers of power for mine licensing.A soum governor (June 2019) identified the difficulty of being positioned between higher level government authorities and his local constituency, On one hand I am a person who represents the State.On the other hand I am representing citizens.I must speak to the State on behalf of 3000 citizens and over 900 herder households of this soum.Also, I am sitting here representing the State.In this sense I am facing many sufferings, right?I must implement the State policy.Therefore, maybe I will have to support the mine since the State issued it a license.On the other hand, since I am representing the soum citizens I will have to oppose the mines.Therefore, I have a lot of suffering.
This statement reflects the overview of the powers of local government in Article 12 of the Law on Minerals, "to organize the implementation of the legislation on mineral resources and decisions made by the Government in connection with its implementation in its respective territory . . ." (LegalInfo 2006).The soum official articulated his clear awareness of the painful position between representing "the State" on the one hand and answering to local citizens on the other.It is noteworthy that he presents the interests of these groups in such stark opposition to each other.Local officials grapple with being a representative of uncomfortable central government decisions, and finding ways to make the law work for the local people who elected them.However the laws themselves are often contradictory, and this leaves room for authorities to interpret them at the local level.A different official (June 2019) related, This statement clearly exhibits the problem of coordination and communication between Ministries and the conflicting policies related to land use, environmental protection, mining and road construction.Soum governments are still structured mainly around a rural economy dominated by pastoralism, with administrative labor devoted to bi-annual livestock censuses, facilitation of loans, winter fodder supplies and livestock insurance to herders.Herders are an important constitutency of voters for local government.With many mine workers working in Gurvantes and Sukhbaatar on temporary shifts, they are not registered to vote in local soum and have little connection with governmental administrative staff who generally hail from the local area.
Outside of a confusing tangle of laws regulating mining activity is the issue of alleged corruption in mineral licensing procedures or simple disregard for local stakeholder engagement.A provincial prosecutor that we spoke to described a dispute that he had with a company who failed to hold a bag level meeting to inform local citizens of the results of their detailed environmental assessment.He speculated that the company produced the EIA using bribes.He reported the violation to the National Professional Inspection Agency and met with the head of a department from the Ministry of Environment.With no measures taken against the mine, the prosecutor identified the problem at the central government level.He explained (June 2019), The company people go to the Ministry, meet with their contacts and have a document issued.That becomes a burden for people like me who is monitoring their operation here on the ground.We end up becoming nobodies.When mines commit violations and we try to take measures, people in power do not do anything.They even try to pressure us.Such problems have occurred.
Repeatedly we heard local authorities report their lack of power in deciding if licenses should be issued in their territory.A soum governor joked in May 2019, "According to the legal system, the citizens, soum and province do not have any authority [to issue mine licenses], but we are always accused and told off [by locals] for opening and selling mines.According to them I am a big shot who is able to sell a mine [Laughing] . . .The fact that mines are overtaking too much land and operating simultaneously is angering citizens and making them oppose it."The governor explained that despite his inability to stop mining from entering their soum territory, he uses the means at his disposal "for obstructing, for delaying for a certain amount of time, for bureaucracy concerning operation of mining . . .all of the time . . ." With the local soum council, he is involved in constant lawsuits and court cases in order to create temporary delays to mining exploration operations.
In one court case, he proposed to a Canadian company representative to give up one of their multiple licenses to release 170,000 hectares of land on his soum territory in exchange for local government support for their remaining operations.The agreement was made for the licensed area to be returned to the soum for US$1 paid by the local Citizens' Representative Council to the company.About a year later, the company brought the governor back to court and accused him of using his state position inappropriately by paying the US$1 amount with his personal cash on the day the deal was struck.The company claimed that the transfer of the license to the soum was invalid because there was no documentation of a formal financial transfer from the Citizen's Representative Council's back account to the company account.The court restored the license in the name of the company; the Canadian who had originally brokered the deal left his position with the mine and was not available to defend the agreement.The soum governor explained, "Once the State grants permission to conduct exploration and the investment is established, there is no question about stopping it at all.It does not stop at all.It can stop for a year or two.Even this one stopped for 6 years." Despite all of the maneuvers to stop mining both from the soum and bag level, once a license is issued it is very difficult to legally revoke.In May 2019, a bag governor explained that during court procedures, companies demanded to be compensated for the money spent on exploration, "They cornered us by saying if you pay that [amount] we will stop, if not we will continue our work.When they do that, what soum can pay them billions?We have nothing like this, and what would a few opposing herders have?"Like the soum governor, the bag governor explained that besides protests at public meetings or in the form of road blocks, they are able to cause bureaucratic delays to the start of mining operations, "we delayed the discussion of their detailed assessment quite a bit.A mining company is supposed to hold a discussion as soon as they receive the A license.We used to kick them out of our bag citizens' general meeting.We kept delaying them like that . . .."Bag meetings are a key space for public discussion, debate and information exchange on local government policy between local officals and herders.The bag governor is the lowest level administrative official in a soum government and acts as a liaison between herder households and the local government.The bag governor does not have authority to overtly fine or halt company activities, but they are able to submit reports and alert higher authorities to problems they observe.As the bag governor described, companies must participate in a bag meeting as a required element of the mine licensing process, though the meeting deliberations have almost no impact on the Central Government's decision to issue a license.While this requirement may appear to give power to local citizens to hold a company accountable for their concerns, it is largely perceived to be a box-ticking exercise.The little leverage a soum government can exert exists in the logistics of the bureaucratic procedure itself, revealing the constraints faced by local authorities in determining their own development trajectories.
Speaking passionately, a soum governor (May 2019) expressed his belief that central government authorities should directly admit their responsibility and be held accountable to the public for their role in issuing licenses without local consent.
At a bag meeting there is no one who would like to give up the land or agree to digging up the land.If the State issued a license back in 2003 and if the professional agencies approved all the conditions for exploration and sent it to local government, the State must stand firmly behind that decision.They should say, 'I am sorry, but you have wealth underground, that is State property, all people's property, not the property of the folks [of this soum], . . .right?Instead of making them understand in this way, they say, we don't know, your local government chair or the MP elected from here said we can and they overtake [the minerals].There is no Government official who can come and say it to us directly, it seems that it is connected to the thing called Politics.Therefore the citizens never lose hope and hope that a new soum Chairman could be alright and will close down the mine, right?
In the absence of local deliberative processes to guide mineral development and enable citizen involvement in decision-making, local officials find alternative means to contest and resist mining development.The lack of transparency around licensing processes and ministerial control creates uncertainty which impedes the ability of local institutions to perform their goverance duties.All of the local government authorities highlighted that bureaucratic delay tactics are a short-term strategy to ward off mineral development, perhaps enabling them to gain local political wins in some cases.

Capturing wealth
Here it is important to establish that many people living in the smaller settlements of the Gobi are aware of the temporality of mining, including experiences of small-scale artisanal extraction.The assumption, held by many supporters of mineral development, that herders will both have the skills to gain employment in mining and will want to give up herding as a livelihood is unfounded.Rather, herders recognize that the loss of their traditional campsites pose a great risk to their future and reputation amongst their community.In the county of Gurvantes, many herders have been displaced multiple times by different mines operating in the area.A herder in Gurvantes (May 2019) explained, When the herders lose their winter camp, they will not be able to grow livestock.Finally, they will end up with no livestock.There are many people whose lives have been ruined by the [mining company].[This company] displaced them and built a tiny house [for them] at the soum center.According to one of my friends, their house is even smaller than the toilet of a wealthy family.Instead of giving some pageantry house thing, it is better to communicate regularly and help occasionally.I don't think the house at the soum center is useful for the herders.Instead of getting a small amount of money from the mine and falling into disrepute, it is better to continue herding and get some help from the mine during the dzud [winter disaster].
Likewise, locals understand that the opportunities presented by mines operating in their area are not only temporary in nature but organized to benefit people and places far away from sites of extraction.Given the fleeting nature of mineral investment and the spatially remote areas where it occurs, how do local people negotiate for a better future for their home-lands?
The local government in Sukhbaatar clearly articulated their perceived benefits provided by the employment created for local citizens in the mining industry.While Tsairt is a Chinese company, there are legal restrictions which limit the number of Chinese employees to 10% of their overall workforce.Foreign workers must register at the soum government office.When Tsairt exceeds the 10% allowance for foreign workers, they are fined.This money is directly allocated to the soum budget.Mongolian employees cooperate with Chinese coworkers as a matter of course; more important are the income, housing and schooling opportunities the mine provides.In late May 2019, a soum governor explained that the fines generated from exceeding Chinese labor allowances are used in the local budget on issues related to pre-school education and health.
In Mongolia the funding does go to the province.Funding allocated to the province does not drip down to the soums.What is coming from Tsairt Mineral to our soum is within Article 43 of the Law on Minerals.That means if they are employing foreign workers, then they must pay fees for them.According to the Mongolian law 10% of the workers can be foreign nationals.If they exceed that limit then they must pay a fine equal to 10 times the minimum wage for a month.That fine goes to our budget according to the law.
The soum government has been able to capture additional financial commitments from mines operating in the soum territory through individual local development agreements with each of the companies.Article 42 of the Law on Minerals (LegalInfo 2019b), "Dealing with the Local Government" specifies that "the license holder shall enter into an agreement with the local administrative organization on issues related to environmental protection, development of infrastructure related to mine operation, establishment of factories and job creation."In reality, the local development agreements are quite diverse.In Sukhbaatar, the local companies may agree to provide coal at a discounted price, support for national holiday celebrations, contribute to infrastructure for schools and kindergartens and local parks, and support government agencies with their technical capacity.During an interview in 2019, the soum governor and provincial governor explained their work to review and negotiate the arrangement for financial flows from cooperation agreements.Speaking colorfully, a representative from the soum environmental office related, They [companies] only do development for the provincial center and nothing at the soum.I said it 2 years ago to [the company] that your company has not even built a statue of a mouse.This company is not operating today.Four years ago they built a fence around a spring and it was not built well, just something to deceive people's eyes.I strongly criticize them on that.Otherwise, Tsairt Mineral's production organization, camp, and landscape planting is really good.They conduct rehabilitation in a timely manner according to schedule.
The lack of wealth coming to the sub-district level (bag) households, who experience the greatest negative impact from extraction, is a point of contention.Across the sites that we visited, each mine has a different approach to "corporate responsibility."In some cases, companies strongly felt that paying taxes was the extent of their "responsibility", and they spoke with great frustration at the expectation that they should do more for the local region, such as build or repair the export roads that they use.The opening vignette of this article speaks to the complex arrangements and conflicts surrounding road development across all of our study regions.The argument presented by soum governments is that mining companies are directly accountable for the dust and disturbances caused by export.In Sukhbaatar soum, trucks transporting coal and spar from nearby soum and provinces pass through the area to reach the nearest export point.A provincial level mining specialist in Sukhbaatar confirmed that road issues are one of the primary complaints of local people; "The companies created multiple roads to transport the product because of the lack of an integrated road in the area.From the local government, we submitted a notice to the companies to improve their road by 1 June 2019.If they don't conform to the requirement, we will stop their activities."Indeed, physically occupying the road to block transport in order to negotiate for local wealth creation was the strategy of herders in a subdistrict in Gurvantes.Angered that the Javkhlant Ord company did not build a local road, the bag governor and local herders halted the transport and negotiated for the company to create a Wealth Sharing Fund with the bag citizens' council.The company gives 150 tugrik (equivalent to £0.03 where 1GBP = 4,047.76MNT)for each ton extracted from the area.It was agreed that 20 trucks would be allowed to transport coal per day and four local people working in pairs would be appointed to monitor if the company regularly watered the road to control the dust.
Local government dilemmas revealed struggles to make mining development relevant to the needs and imagined futures of rural residents.By leveraging laws related to environmental protection, bureaucratic procedures and corporate social responsibility, local authorities have found ways to salvage some benefits from the making of ruins in their soum.While these strategies are imperfect and often only provide temporary plugs on extraction processes, they demonstrate the everyday contestations and negotiations of local leaders to preserve their homelands and the hope that development benefits citizens and existing rural livelihoods.

Conclusion
Drawing on qualitative research in Gurvantes and Sukhbaatar provinces, this article explores local bureaucratic processes to stall, suspend operations or prevent licensing through the creation of protected areas and securing of financial support and patronage through corporate social responsibility.
Sukhbaatar and Gurvantes are part of Mongolia's mining belt, which connects Mongolia and China in new and emerging ways.As the opening vinette of this article illustrates, there are numberous actors which coalesce on the Gobi export roads with the primary purpose of extracting and exporting minerals.While there are many examples of small scale disputes and more dramatically stage protests, here we focused on an underexplored mining stakeholder: local government officials.
Many examples of resistance unfold in soum government offices or are brought to Mongolian domestic courts, never appearing in international or domestic media.Our analysis in this paper has been limited to the everyday struggles of local government authorities, as they interact with central government authorities, herders and companies.Laws and legal regulations were used to bring companies to court, delay procedures or temporarily prohibit licensing.Environmental protections provided a particularly powerful means of halting extraction in the short-term, which further revealed the relative power of environmental regulations compared to weak social protection measures or herder land rights.
This paper contributes to work on resource politics in Mongolia by highlighting the power dynamics between central government actors and local government authorities.The relative powerlessness of local government to halt or revoke mining licenses in their counties (soum) is apparent.Local authorities, already constrained by small budgets and limited staff, face pressure to prevent further physical loss of territory (due to extensive removal of the land), hold companies accountable and achieve meaningful benefits for local people.These dynamics also reflect the centralized power of state authorities over the mineral sector, while the agricultural sector (mainly pastoralism) is largely decentralized.Here is a central contradiction in resource conflicts in Mongolia.While power to issue land possession certificates for herder winter and spring camps is decentralized to local authorities, they have no decisionmaking power in the realm of mine licensing on the same land.Similiarly, pasture and water management falls within local government jurisdiction, yet this job becomes particularily difficult when soum land is re-ordered by the presence of underground mineral wealth and subsequent company control over these resources.Alongside the expansion of infrastructure networks to facilitate the cross-border mineral trade with China, these developments reveal a transformation of territorial control and perhaps slow unraveling of soum or "nutug/homeland" based decision-making power over land use and tenure rights.Further research is needed to understand the impacts of expansive mining on social cohesion and local place-based identities in rural Mongolia.
The Mongolia case resonates with the extensive literature on expanding mining frontiers, which strongly features the impacts of grabbing, enclosure and commercialization of common lands formerly considered to be environmentally or economically "marginal".The acquisition of land for extraction involves a total material transformation -subsoil from the greater Gobi is being physically removed in great quantities and either exported abroad, or reassembled in the form of deep pits surrounded by tall overburden piles.We have referred to this as a form of "ruination" in order to draw attention to the politics of extraction-based development and highlight the loss of place -quite literally -that local actors face.The extensive extraction and export operations and proliferation of mineral ruins in the Gobi signals a wider existential crisis posed by loss of place and the rural identities connected to them.This is a critical issue to consider as current approaches to mineral development in Mongolia deprives local governments of decision-making power in their own administrative jurisdictions and limits the means to hold companies and central government authorities accountable to the demands of local citizens.This is expecially difficult when local constitutienties view mining as a direct threat to the future of traditional rural livelihoods.To speak of "ruins in the making" also points to critical questions regarding the potential future of a transformed postextraction Gobi-what will life in the ruins look like for the people who remain?

Figure 1 .
Figure 1.Map of Mongolia including fieldsite provinces (Umnugobi, Sukhbaatar) and international border crossings denoted by 'X'.Map created by Chris McCarthy and used with his permission.
Sometimes, I have difficulties to do my work because of the conflicting positions of the relevant Ministries.For instance, the Ministry of Mining pushes mining activities to collect [money for] the State budget while the Ministry of Road and Construction and the Ministry of Environment and Tourism are against the decision.I can't decide whose decision I have to follow.