Earth-rights and environmental rights in the global governance: a study of the conflicting relationship over land tenure in the Southern Gobi

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The region of Southern Gobi in Mongolia is undergoing a process of economic transformation brought about by the presence of the largely foreign-owned Oyu Tolgoi mine and infrastructural and development projects that intend to integrate the area into the global market economy. Understanding locality as a node of global connections, place-based processes enter into conversation with the ever-changing dynamics of capital and culture at many levels. Nomadic practices, state actors, NGOs and transnational corporations intersect in the same space; however, the encounter across different understandings of what constitutes the social, the political and the human entails equivocal connections. By elaborating on the access to resources and land, Iris intends to explore the conflictual relationship that arises- among the different actors and among herders themselves-between an environment perceived, on the one hand, as a commodity and, on the other hand, as a means to reshape herders' collective identity. Primitive accumulation, dispossession and the destructionof an environment do not only contribute to the assimilation of the "rural" economy into a market-oriented one but as the landscape is physically overturned, a model of rational development is installed through cognitive control and social regulation. As the local political voice is being overridden by hegemonic discourses, this project contributes to the needto create alternative forms of political thinking in the global governance.