For nearly two decades, the country’s forest and water sector has been shuffled from one structure to another so many times that even those working within it would be forgiven for losing count. Merged, split, dissolved, revived and merged again, the story of these agencies reads less like sound policy planning and more like a game of musical chairs, one where the music stops just often enough to keep everyone on their toes.
It began in 2003, when the Forest and Water Branch of the Institute of Geoecology, under the Mongolian Academy of Sciences, joined forces with the Forest Exploration Project Center. Out of that union came the Forest and Water Exploration and Research Center, housed under the Ministry of Environment. On paper, the logic made sense. Forests and water are two sides of the same ecological coin, and pairing them under one roof followed a model used the world over.
That arrangement did not last. By 2005, the government decided water management deserved a house of its own, and the Water Affairs Department was carved out as a standalone implementing agency. The water specialists and structure that had once formed half of the research center packed up and moved to the new department. Left holding only the forest half of its mandate, the research center soldiered on for a few more years before being dissolved altogether in 2008. That same year, in a broader shake-up of government, the Forest Agency was established under the newly formed Ministry of Environment and Tourism, while the Water Affairs Department was rebranded as the Water Department. Two agencies, once one, now going their separate ways.
The pendulum swung again in 2012, when the reform-minded Government of the day dissolved both the Water and Forest Departments outright, folding their responsibilities into a general department of the sectoral ministry. The reasoning offered was that standalone agencies were no longer necessary. For eight years, water management effectively had no dedicated home. It was not until 2020 that the Water Department returned as an independent structure, this time under amendments to the Water Law that gave it firmer legal footing. Two years later, in 2022, the Forest Department followed suit, re-established with its own structure and mandate to help drive the president’s “Billion Trees” national movement.
Six restructurings in under 20 years. Any single change might be explained away as fine-tuning. Taken together, they paint a picture of a sector perpetually starting from scratch, reinventing the wheel each time a new administration decides the old arrangement no longer suits its purposes. This is not simply a forest and water problem. It is a window into a wider habit of state policy, one where agencies are stood up and torn down at the whim of whoever holds the reins, their names and mandates chopped and changed as if they were furniture to be rearranged rather than institutions built to serve the public over the long haul. The irony is that the original impulse, back in 2003, got something right. Forests and water are interlinked by nature, and pairing a policy ministry with an implementing agency for both is common practice internationally. This country was, in fact, ahead of the curve in setting up a joint Forest and Water Exploration and Research Center. What has followed since is a cautionary tale of how quickly good instincts can be undone by a lack of institutional staying power, and how hard it is to hit the ground running when the ground itself keeps shifting underfoot.
The center had no fly-by-night operation. It was built on the bedrock of an institute steeped in research and development, joined at the hip with an organization that had cut its teeth on forest projects for years, and by every measure it earned its keep in the environmental sector. Even now, long after the fact, its legacy is spoken of in glowing terms, remembered as the cornerstone of scientific research and exploration in forestry and water management. This was not a body cobbled together to tick a box. It was born of a genuine need, called into being by the demands of its time. All the more reason its fate is such a bitter pill to swallow. Barely two years after the ink dried on its founding, the center was cut in half in the name of management reform, and its two halves have been going their separate ways ever since. Researchers lay much of the blame for the environmental sector’s fractured, directionless policy squarely at that split. Worse still, the eight years in which forest and water research work ground to a complete halt, despite the plain need for a dedicated, standalone structure, are widely seen as the moment the sector was pushed to the brink of a full-blown policy crisis, one that saw its most seasoned professionals walk out the door and take decades of hard-won expertise with them. If there is one sector on earth that cannot afford to be knocked about like a punching bag, it is the environment. Results worth having take years, sometimes decades, to bear fruit, and there is no planting for the long haul when the rules of the game are rewritten every time the wind changes. But stability does not fall from the sky. It has to be built, brick by brick, and it starts with one thing above all: institutions sturdy enough to still be standing tomorrow.
Ecologist and researcher B.Shinekhuu did not mince words on the toll this institutional churn has taken on both society and the economy. “Environmental projects, particularly forest restoration and water resource accumulation, are not a sprint. They are a marathon that takes at least ten to twenty years to bear fruit. But when the organizations carrying out these projects and programs get reshuffled, redirected, or shut down every time a new government comes in, everything poured into the previous effort goes down the drain,” he said.
The fallout, he explained, runs on several fronts at once. First and foremost is the loss of policy continuity, which leaves long-term projects stuck in limbo. Second comes the loss of professional staff, a particularly costly blow in fields like forestry and water that live or die by scientific rigor and institutional memory. “Every time a government organization’s structure gets shaken up in Mongolia, the ranks fill up with more political appointees from outside the sector. Research and archival records take a hit too. Mergers and dissolutions of similar agencies have a way of letting data and archives fall through the cracks and gather dust, forgotten. The moment an employee walks out the door, a whole tangle of problems crops up around whatever function they used to handle. The environmental sector is no exception. A great deal of research and information has been lost and left to rot this way,” he noted.
Then there is the matter of money down the drain. Every time an agency is stood up or wound down, a hefty sum gets siphoned from the budget just to cover administrative and operating costs, on top of severance for laid-off staff and payouts from legal disputes that inevitably follow. Taken together, B.Shinekhuu argues, the instability of state institutions carries a heavy price tag, one that ripples out from a single sector to society and the economy at large, both directly and in ways harder to trace. “It is hard to put a precise figure on how much damage our country has done to the environmental sector by dissolving, merging, and playing musical chairs with the forest and water agencies. But the state these two sectors are in today speaks volumes about a system in crisis,” he added.
State authorities, ministers and other officials are quick to talk up grand projects, planting a billion trees, building 333 lakes and ponds, while striking a pose of environmental stewardship. In practice, though, they have failed to pull the forest and water sector out of its human resources crisis, and they have failed to get policies and plans pulling in the same direction. However, the very fact that new structures, such as forest training, research and cooperation centers, keep getting floated and talked about suggests a stubborn myth still holds sway in government circles that public money grows on trees and that government initiatives are built to last forever.
Just recently, the Ministry of Environment and Climate Change announced plans for a forestry training and research center in Baganuur District, to be built in cooperation with Slovenia. Word has also gone around about a Mongolia-China cooperation center for afforestation and restoration work, folded into the “Billion Trees” national movement. Put it all together, and the country’s policy direction on forests and water starts to look like a moving target, unclear at best and contradictory at worst. On one hand, the argument goes that an independent structure is unnecessary, that scrapping it would cut duplication, tighten the belt, and let officials dissolve agencies whenever they see fit. On the other hand, without a dedicated structure, the work stalls, functions get quietly dropped, and a brand-new unit gets conjured up out of thin air to patch the gap. Both arguments cannot be right at once, and the whipsawing between them is precisely the problem. The truth is, there is no shortage of structures already operating in the forest and water space, both on the research side and at the level of carrying out government functions. What is missing is not more agencies. It is the will and the discipline to tie the ones that already exist together and get them pulling their weight in the same direction.
All the major universities, the National University of Mongolia (NUM), the Mongolian University of Science and Technology (MUST), the Mongolian University of Life Sciences, already have research departments, faculty and researchers who specialize in forestry and water. This is not a thin bench. MUST runs its own forestry training and research institute, complete with staff who have spent careers in the field. NUM houses a forest program department tucked inside its School of Engineering and Technology, with an Ecological Education Center attached at the hip, feeding students and research alike into the pipeline. The Mongolian Academy of Sciences, for its part, sits on a deep well of accumulated research and data through its Geography, Geoecology and Botanical Garden institutes, decades of fieldwork and archives that few new agencies could hope to replicate from scratch. Even within the machinery of government itself, the Ministry of Environment and Climate Change and the Ulaanbaatar Department of Environment both maintain dedicated divisions already responsible for forest and water matters. Layer on top of that the Center for Environmental Research and Analysis and the Center for Freshwater Resources and Nature Protection and the picture comes into sharp focus: the cupboard is anything but bare. If anything, it is overstuffed, and what is missing is not more shelving but someone to organize what is already there.
So the question all but asks itself, and it deserves a straight answer rather than another press release. Why draw up yet another structure, and who exactly stands to gain from it? Is it the researchers on the ground, who could use more stability rather than more competition for the same funding? Or is it the officials for whom a fresh institution means fresh appointments to hand out? What would a new forestry training, research, and cooperation center actually contribute that is not already sitting on the shelf, gathering dust for want of coordination rather than for want of capacity? Building new signage on the door has never once, in this sector’s history, solved the problem of what happens inside the building.
The smarter path, and by far the more obvious one, is to work with what already exists on the ground to give these institutions, universities, academy institutes and ministry departments alike, the room, the mandate, and the incentive to pull in the same direction instead of duplicating each other’s work in silos. Alongside that, there is a pressing need to put a solid legal foundation under the Government’s implementing agencies, one sturdy enough that they can operate on stable, predictable footing year after year, rather than lurching from one reorganization to the next depending on who happens to be in office.
The researcher has said his piece, and said it plainly, on the damage that unstable state policy and shifting institutional structures inflict on society and the economy alike, the wasted budgets, the scattered archives, the professionals who walk out the door and never come back. But strip away all the technical language and every one of these consequences funnels down to one and the same destination: ecological degradation that spirals further and further out of anyone’s control. And while the government tangles itself up in internal turf wars and gut-wrenching decisions, made, unmade and remade with each change of administration, the ones quietly cashing in behind the scenes carry on with their schemes and their theft, business as usual, entirely undisturbed by the noise. It is, in the end, a state apparatus in name only, a shell of an institution going through the motions of governance while the wolves mind the henhouse.
