Dusty roads and disconnections: Perceptions of dust from unpaved mining roads in Mongolia's South Gobi province

South Gobi province is at the center of Mongolia's mining boom, where companies began exporting minerals over dirt-track roads in the early 2000s. This paper examines recent controversies surrounding road dust near the Oyu Tolgoi copper-gold mine, the so-called coal road from Tavan Tolgoi mines, and the Chinese border. At the time of the research, local residents, particularly nomadic herders, were concerned that dust produced from unpaved mining roads was coating the pasture, causing illnesses among livestock, and endangering their livelihoods in the region. The presence of dust rendered mining an uncomfortably intimate experience as state and corporate actors negotiated responsibility for infrastructure development. The paper builds on the concept “technologies of distantiation” to reveal the complex ways that dust from unpaved roads creates distances and disconnections between people, livelihoods, and landscapes, representing an enclosure of the pasture. Methods for the paper include interviews, focus groups, and participant observation conducted in South Gobi province and Ulaanbaatar in 2010, 2011, and 2012 as well as follow-up research carried out in spring 2015.