Research, part of a Special Feature on Resilience and Vulnerability of Arid and Semi-Arid Social Ecological Systems China's Grassland Contract Policy and its Impacts on Herder Ability to Benefit in…

By Wenjun Li, L. Huntsinger. 2011

210 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Northern China's grasslands have been losing productivity since the 1980s, when a policy known as the "grassland contracting policy" allocated commonly used grazing lands to individual herder households. Examined here is the connection between implementation of the grassland contracting policy and the loss of grassland production using the analytic concepts of ability to benefit and community failure. A gacha (village) of the Sunite Left Banner of the Xilingol League in Inner Mongolia is used as a case study to compare herder ability to benefit from rangeland resources during adverse climate events before and after policy implementation. Social-ecological resilience, access to social and ecological assets, and institutions supporting crisis relief have been affected. We find that the privatization of grassland use rights has weakened pastoralist ability to benefit from rangelands by weakening or dismantling what are identified as the rights-, structure-, and relations-based abilities that enabled pastoralists to cope with nonequilibrium conditions. This has led to a community failure that engenders feedbacks of increased impoverishment and environmental deterioration. The inflexible boundaries of quasi-private household property rights have caused the pastoral system to lose capacity to respond to drought and weather events through the flexibility of "otor" and other forms of herd movement, increasing vulnerability to environmental change.

Subfields: Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e55a8f6cdc31460c6cd661ab214a0182de195499

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In Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law

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Citations in the corpus

• Farmland Conversion Decreases Regional and National Land Quality in China (2017, background): “…was largely because of the Grain-for-Green policy, first implemented by the Ministry of Land and Resources of China in 1999 in the Loess Plateau (Feng et al., 2005; Huang et al., 2011; Li & Huntsinger, 2011; Peng et al., 2007; Xu et al., 2006) and expanded the following year to the rest of China.”
• Sand and Dust Storms: Impact Mitigation (2017, background): “policy instruments designed to improve the environment by restoring grassland ecology, combatting desertification and reducing dust storms [82].”
• The Palaearctic steppe biome: a new synthesis (2016, background): “The environmental effects have not received attention until recently, mainly under socio-economic perspectives (Conte and Tilt 2014; Kreutzmann 2013; Li and Huntsinger 2011; Ptackova 2011).”
• Climate adaptation, local institutions, and rural livelihoods: A comparative study of herder communities in Mongolia and Inner Mongolia, China (2013, background): “Although several studies have been conducted to investigate social vulnerability and adaptation to climate on the Mongolian plateau (Fernandez-Giménez et al., 2012; Li and Huntsinger, 2011; Li and Li, 2012; Murphy, 2011; Sternberg, 2010; Vernooy, 2011; Zhang, 2007), more empirical studies of the liv”
• China’s new rural “separating three property rights” land reform results in grassland degradation: Evidence from Inner Mongolia (2018, background): “Meanwhile, the HRS caused the collapse of community cooperation (Li & Huntsinger, 2011), led to the loss of traditional ecological knowledge (Zhang et al., 2013), and https://doi.org/10.1016/j.landusepol.2017.11.052 Received 29 August 2016; Received in revised form 16 October 2017; Accepted 26…”