Kyrgyzstan's 2009 Pasture Law — Community Pasture Users' Unions and Fee-Funded Rangeland Management

After Kyrgyzstan's 1991 independence, Soviet-era collective pastures were privatised and leased out in a fragmented way that encouraged overgrazing near villages while remote pastures went unused; by the 2000s, up to 75% of pastures and forests in some districts were degraded. The 2009 Pasture Law returned all pastureland to state ownership and devolved its management to local communities.
The law established one Jayit (Pasture) Committee in every region and enabled villages to form Pasture Users' Unions (PUUs). The national PUU federation, Kyrgyz Jayity, now represents 454 PUUs (with 14 staff and 158 volunteers) with formal management oversight of roughly 9 million hectares of rangeland, according to the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration's initiative registry, which lists a 52,640-hectare restoration target for 2030. Communities use revenue from pasture-use fees, paid into PUU accounts, to fund rotational-grazing infrastructure, boundary demarcation and pasture improvement.
An independently evaluated, peer-reviewed 2015 study in the journal Pastoralism ('Promises and realities of community-based pasture management approaches: Observations from Kyrgyzstan') found a real gap between the law's design and practice: the pasture committees studied managed to collect less than half of the pasture fees due in 2012, weakening the reinvestment mechanism the whole model depends on.
At district level, a parallel GIZ-funded project (€4.9 million, 2018-2023, implemented with Unique Land Use GmbH and the CAMP Alatoo Foundation) piloted a refined pasture-and-walnut-forest co-management approach with a pasture-monitoring app in the Bazar-Korgon and Aksy districts of Jalal-Abad region — showing the national framework is still being adapted locally, though quantified outcome data from that pilot are not yet public.

Read the full analysis: https://pastoralismjournal.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s13570-015-0035-8