Climate Activism and Environmental Politics in Mongolia

Abstract

This chapter presents ethnographic material on Mongolian environmental movements to provide an account of climate activism in the country. It shows how the protection of the environment has extreme political salience. More than this, the manner in which this plays out within both environmental activism and the wider population forces us to question the logic we assume to be present in global climate politics. This overview will unsettle an often-implicit assumption in contemporary accounts: that social movements seeking to protect the environment or reduce the effects of climate change are automatically progressive, or somehow left wing. The chapter shows how particular moral conceptions of the landscape and environment can in turn generate forms of climate activism rather different from those observed in the global north. The material from Mongolia is used to hint at a more general comparative point: that the coming political struggle will not so much be between those who seek to prevent run away climate change and those who ignore it, but rather what kind of politics (and restructuring of societies) emerges as a response to climate change as an unavoidable fact.