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Good practice Imported

Mongolia's Green Gold Programme — National Pasture User Groups for Rotational Grazing and Rangeland Recovery

Mongolia · Ulaanbaatar · See the Mongolia profile · See the Ulaanbaatar profile

Evidence: Observational / pre–post Top 27% 53/100 · Ask Evidence Copilot about this practice

Since 2004 Switzerland's SDC has organised Mongolian herders into 1,500+ Pasture User Groups (90,000+ households) for rotational grazing. Monitoring credits it with recovering millions of hectares, but figures rely on self-reporting, not an independent trial.

1,500+
Pasture User Groups with signed agreements
90,000+
Herder households covered
5,000+
Permanent monitoring observation points
~5 million hectares
Rangeland reported recovered (first 8 years) (2004-2012)
Mongolia's Green Gold Programme — National Pasture User Groups for Rotational Grazing and Rangeland Recovery

Details

Maturity
Established
Promoter
Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC) & Mongolian National Federation of Pasture User Groups (MNFPUG)
Period
2004-present
Keywords
agriculture, rangeland management, pastoralism, rural development

Context

Since 2004 the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC) has funded the "Green Gold" programme to rebuild customary rotational-grazing institutions on Mongolia's rangelands, of which an estimated 65% were degraded by the early 2000s. Herders are organised into Pasture User Groups (PUGs) signing voluntary Rangeland User Agreements with local government, coordinated since 2015 under a national federation (MNFPUG).

Results

By later programme phases, more than 1,500 PUGs and over 90,000 herder households had signed agreements. SDC's own reporting, based on a national monitoring network of more than 5,000 permanent observation points, credits the programme with restoring several million hectares of rangeland; independent environmental-news coverage cited an estimated 5 million hectares recovered within the first eight years, a figure the implementer's later communications put at roughly 20 million hectares after 15 years.

Conclusions

These are the implementing agency's own monitoring figures rather than results from an independently designed control-site trial, so the scale of recovery should be read as indicative. The programme's clearest, most verifiable achievement is institutional: a durable, government-recognised co-management structure persisting for two decades.

Implementation
Indicative cost
High (€500k–€5M)
Time to results
Long (> 3 years)
Staffing & skills
Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC), Mongolian National Federation of Pasture User Groups (MNFPUG), Pasture User Groups (herder-led)

Conditions for success

  • voluntary Rangeland User Agreements between herders and local government
  • national ecological classification (22 site groups) and monitoring network
  • durable national federation coordinating PUGs since 2015

Commonly funded by

National / regional programmes LIFE Programme

Indicative funding routes for practices of this type — always check each programme's current calls and eligibility rules.

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Data sources

Where this practice's information was retrieved from, and when.

Attachments

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