Browsing by Author "Li, Wenjun"

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Chinas Grassland Contract Policy and its Impacts on Herder Ability to Benefit in Inner Mongolia: Tragic Feedbacks
(2011) Li, Wenjun; Huntsinger, Lynn
"Northern Chinas 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."
Managing Rangeland as a Complex System: How Government Interventions Decouple Social Systems from Ecological Systems
(2012) Li, Wenjun; Li, Yanbo
"The complexity of natural resource management is increasingly recognized and requires adaptive governance at multiple levels. It is particularly significant to explore the impacts of government interventions on the management practices of local communities and on target social-ecological systems. The Inner Mongolian rangeland was traditionally managed by indigenous people using their own institutions that were adapted to the highly variable local climate and were able to maintain the resilience of the social-ecological system for more than 1000 years. However, external interventions have significantly affected the rangeland social-ecological system in recent decades. In this paper, using livestock breed improvement as an example, we track government interventions from the traditional era through the collective period to the present market economy period based on a review of historical documents and case studies. Using the concept of social-ecological system resilience, we diagnose the impacts of interventions on livestock breed management in the rangeland social-ecological system, and discuss how these interventions occur. We found that government interventions in livestock breeding have gradually decoupled the pastoral society from its supporting ecological system. During this process, external powers have increasingly displaced the local community in defining the nature of rangeland management. Power asymmetry and discourse have contributed to this displacement."