External publications

Polycentric water governance in Mongolia: is it fit to contain pollution from mining?

Dombrowsky, Ines / Mirja Schoderer / Jean Carlo Rodríguez-de-Francisco / Ariunaa Lkhagvadorj
External Publications (2025)

in: Andreas Thiel / Elizabeth Baldwin / Mark Stephan / Sergio Villamayor-Tomas (Hrsg.), Modes of Coordination and Performance in Polycentric Governance: Disentangling Complexity, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 112-130

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/9780198944720.003.0007
Information

In Mongolia, a mining boom has significantly increased pressures on water resources, negatively affecting human health and ecosystems. In this chapter, we ask how polycentric water governance and the interaction of different modes of coordination play out in Mongolia and what this implies for the protection of rivers against pollution from mining. By presenting a case study from a developing and transitioning country, this chapter also contributes to a better understanding of how contextual factors affect different coordination modes. We find that protecting rivers from mining pollution remains a considerable challenge in Mongolia. While new rules and actors at the basin level have fostered cooperation among public-sector agencies, due to power asymmetries, public agencies tend to avoid direct cooperation with mining companies. Instead, interaction with mining operators mainly happens through different types of hierarchical interrelations, but their effectiveness is undermined through lobbying, collusion, and corruption. Next to power asymmetries, economic, political, cultural, and environmental contextual factors constrain mining pollution abatement.

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