Rural to urban migration in Mongolia - Social-ecological conditions for a stepwise process

Since the 1990s, Mongolia's capital city Ulaanbaatar has recorded steady and rapid population growth due to rural-urban migration. So far, little is known about how the social and ecological conditions of migration interact. Thus, in our study we investigated the rural-urban migration process from the countryside to the capital in the Eastern Steppe conducting semi-structured interviews. Our results show that this rural-urban migration often follows a stepwise process from smaller settlements to larger urban agglomerations. The results also demonstrate a complex interplay between the prevailing social, economic, and ecological factors. While social factors (kinship, education) show the same relevance at each step of migration, ecological factors such as the occurrence of dzud seem more relevant at the early stages, from the steppe to the sum centres. Ecological factors only seem to rank second in importance, after social reasons. Economic reasons are also revealed to be very significant but seem most relevant the closer the migrations are to the capital. These results are essential in order to cope with current and future challenges of population development and find solutions to enable traditional Mongolian nomadism even under a modern lifestyle.