Emergent new thinking on pastoral livelihood systems emphasises the strategic importance of high-quality resource patches within the landscape, both for pastoral production and for sustainability. In Mongolia, as in other herding economics, informal land tenure arrangements have evolved at the local level to regulate herders' access to these resources. This article consider how, historically, they have operated in conjunction with allocative procedures of a more formal nature, under first feudal‐theocratic then socialist state structures. A deliberate strategy that seeks to combine various customary and collective forms of tenure with new forms of private ownership may now be of value in the context of contemporary reforms of property legislation under perestroika. This would assist efforts to increase productivity in the livestock sector, and at the same time help ensure the sustainable management of Mongolia's rangelands in the longer term.