Mongolian pastoralist households with children face an annual decision at the start of the school year—how to take care of both herds and children separated by long distances and resource needs. This article draws on twelve months of ethnographic research on rural work practices among mobile pastoralists in Mongolia to illustrate how children's access to primary education spatially transforms the organization of herder livelihoods. By prioritizing herder reflections and theoretical insight into their own lives and experiences, we show that educating children within the conditions of Mongolia's emerging market macroeconomic system is entangled in struggles over housing, finance, and labor and we highlight the spatial nature of these contradictions in everyday rural social production. This evidence supports our argument that the terms of inclusion in Mongolia's current schooling system pose challenges for pastoralist livelihoods and encourages reflection on the need for imagining innovations in education provision.

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.

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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 leveladministrative 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.

This paper explores the role of kinship in herder claims for winter shelter ownership in rural Mongolia, where pastureland is currently designated as state-owned property in the national constitution. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted amongst mobile pastoralist households, this article demonstrates how contemporary winter pasture rights take shape within a locus of political relations structured by custodial land-use practices. It highlights the ways that herders negotiate for territorial rights through appeals to established regional families and are how these appeals are mediated by local government administration. From this analysis, I argue that concepts of kinship in the political economy of pastoralism should be re-examined in light of current debates around land-tenure legislation in Mongolia.

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