Gazar gerchilgeeg dagdag (Mongolia)

Gazar gerchilgeeg dagdag
Location: Mongolia
Definition: An informal rule in Mongolia asserting that ownership of a building automatically entails control of the land beneath it, even though all land legally belongs to the state.
Keywords: Mongolia – Central Asia – Former Soviet Union – East Asia – Property – Urban – Informal Governance – Bureaucracy
Clusters: Informal Governance – Market – Functional ambivalence
Author: Enerzaya Gundalai
Affiliation: Alumnus of School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London, UK
Website: https://www.linkedin.com/in/enerzaya

By Enerzaya Gundalai, Alumnus of School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London, UK

In Mongolia, the expression gazar gerchilgeeg dagdag – literally ‘the land follows the certificate’ – summarises a quiet but powerful assumption that has come to structure property life since the early 1990s. It means that if a person holds the certificate for an immovable property – an apartment, house or office building – the ground under it is regarded, socially and commercially, as theirs. The phrase inverts a central principle of formal property law, superficies solo cedit (‘the building follows the land’), turning it on its head so that, in practice, the land follows the building. This inversion is not written in any statute, yet it determines how Mongolians buy, sell, build and defend space (Nyamdoo 2021: 63–70).

Following the 1990 democratic revolution, a new constitution was adopted in 1992. It declared all land to be state property but allowed citizens limited rights of ownership, possession and use. Only the first – private ownership – was meant to create true freehold title, but less than one percent of national territory ever entered that category (World Bank 2015: 25). The rest remained under temporary possession (ezemshih) and use (ashiglah) leases, renewable only at the discretion of local officials (World Bank 2015: 24–37). The privatisation in the early 1990s started with apartments and other buildings, not with land. People bought homes whose soil stayed in state hands. The result was an institutional mismatch: privately owned walls standing on publicly owned ground. Over time, practical necessity resolved the contradiction by informal decree: if one owned the structure, one must surely own the site – gazar gerchilgeeg dagdag.

Example of a gerchilgee (certificate) issued by the Ministry of Environment and Tourism for land use within a protected area. Source: Enerzaya Gundalai. © Enerzaya Gundalai.

Two incompatible systems subsequently grew side by side. The Land Law governed state land leases, while the Civil Code introduced German-style property rules intended to restore the superficies solo cedit hierarchy (Nyamdoo 2021: 66–80). Each developed its own registry, language and bureaucracy. Citizens, notaries and judges now navigate between them. Most urban transactions rely on a property certificate rather than a land title; many buildings in Ulaanbaatar’s ger districts and central redevelopments stand on ground whose formal lease has expired. Yet business, mortgages, and inheritance proceed undisturbed because everyone accepts the certificate as proof enough. In the absence of legal certainty, social consensus delivers credibility (World Bank 2015: 39–40).

This informal rule has shaped a broad range of behaviour. Buyers often assume that the land accompanies the house; sellers exploit that expectation, occasionally transferring only the structure. Some owners choose not to register the underlying land to avoid taxes and renewal fees, confident that possession of the certificate(gerchilgee) offers adequate protection (Plueckhahn 2020: 104–6). Construction companies holding short-term ezemshih rights use those same papers to pressure authorities for renewal, sometimes mobilising residents to protest delays (World Bank 2015: 25–27). The belief that the land ‘follows’ the property thus becomes a tool of negotiation as well as security. As documented in the World Bank’s Land Administration and Management in Ulaanbaatar (2015: 25–27), disputes over duplicate certificates and unregistered ‘carve-outs’ of public plots have become emblematic of the saying gazar gerchilgeeg dagdag.

The social logic behind it is performative rather than doctrinal. Ownership in Ulaanbaatar is demonstrated through visible acts – fencing, extending, investing, and maintaining – backed by a piece of paper that serves less as legal evidence than as a token of credibility (Plueckhahn 2017: 12–17). As Plueckhahn observes, Mongolians practise a form of ‘dynamic ownership’ that turns possession into an ongoing negotiation of legitimacy rather than a fixed legal state (Plueckhahn 2020: 100–16). In this sense, gazar gerchilgeeg dagdag provides an ethical grammar of belonging. It reassures neighbours, lenders, and officials that one’s claim is legitimate because it is embodied, displayed, and socially confirmed (Sneath 2002: 181–83).

Institutionally, the rule performs what law fails to do. It supplies continuity in an insecure environment. The World Bank has described Mongolia’s ‘dual property registry’ and frequent database tampering, yet the system endures precisely because people rely on its informality (World Bank 2015: 19–27). The World Economic Forum ranks Mongolia among the weakest worldwide for property-rights protection, but its urban real-estate markets remain active (World Economic Forum 2019: 394–96). Informal certainty substitutes formal clarity; transactions move forward on faith that paper and practice coincide. The result is what Plueckhahn calls a ‘productive anticommons’: overlapping rights that encourage construction, speculation, and circulation instead of paralysis (Plueckhahn 2020: 13–22).

At the same time, this vernacular certainty entrenches fragility. It allows discretionary renewal of land leases, fostering patronage networks and corruption (World Bank 2015: 79–80). It normalises the absence of a unified cadastre, discourages infrastructural investment, and drives the unplanned expansion of Ulaanbaatar’s peripheries (Plueckhahn 2020: 112–15). Politically, it converts administrative favour into a form of capital: to have one’s ezemshih right extended is to be recognised by the state. Economically, it sustains an informal credit system in which certificates function as collateral despite their ambiguous legality.

Comparable patterns appear in other cultural contexts. In no entry, overlapping municipal and revenue registries sustain a lively property market where documentation, instead of title, secures possession. In post-socialist Estonia, a similar divide between building and land ownership was resolved through digital land registration and strict adherence to superficies solo cedit (Nyamdoo 2021: 67–69). Mongolia has not yet made that transition. Its citizens, developers, and officials continue to rely on belief and precedent – what might be called credible commitment by practice – to keep urban life functioning.

Gazar gerchilgeeg dagdag stands as both symptom and solution: a symptom of weak formal institutions and a solution crafted within them. It exemplifies how an imported legal framework was subtly reframed through everyday reasoning. Through this inversion, Mongolians transformed the uncertainties of post-socialist transition into a workable social contract. To own, in this context, is to be recognised as an owner by others. The law may assert that land remains in state hands, yet social practice holds that land follows the certificate – and it is this practice that ultimately prevails.