Suchergebnisse

Studies of mobile pastoralist livelihoods have shown that a variety of sociotechnical practices have been developed to achieve reliable outputs from livestock in variable arid and semi-arid environments. This paper builds upon the concept of pastoralists as high-reliability seekers rather than risk-averse and makes a case for understanding Mongolian herders as well adapted to livestock production in highly variable climatic conditions within a certain threshold of risk and uncertainty. This system fails, however, during instances of high uncertainty and covariate risk such as in cases of the natural hazard dzud, which requires individual households to make significant cash investments in risk management. It forwards the idea that investing in local government—soum and bag level— administrative capacity and infrastructure is needed to build system resilience to covariate risk. Based on ethnographic research in rural Bayankhongor, this paper interrogates how dzud interfaces with socio-economic factors amongst pastoralists in central west Mongolia.

China's $1 trillion One Belt, One Road (OBOR) infrastructure project has significant landscape, socio-economic, and political implications in recipient countries. To date, investigation has focused on Chinese motivation and plans rather than OBOR impact in host nations. This paper examines the programme from the perspective of two Central Asian states—Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan—that are at the heart of OBOR. We identify geographical factors that constrain infrastructure, recognise geopolitical contestation between Russia and China, address historical and cultural factors, and consider issues of institutional capacity and marginality that may be impediments to China's initiative. The discussion then focuses on how OBOR may play out in Central Asian landscapes and suggests how to conceive and address the unprecedented transformation in the region's built environment. Critical issues are that OBOR has not been grounded in the physical geography, practical understanding of OBOR's impacts is missing, and the state-citizen-China nexus remains unexplored. As pivot nations, OBOR implementation in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan will showcase the Chinese programme's strengths and highlight its weaknesses.