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Abstract:
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"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."
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