Since the 1980s, the property rights regime of China’s grasslands has been progressively reformed to stimulate the profitability of small farmers and the sustainable use of grasslands. After forty years, the practice of diversified local property rights system arrangements has been developed in the grasslands, with correspondingly different intensities of grassland utilization and livestock productivity. However, most academic and practical examinations have focused on community-owned grasslands, leaving the governance of the state-owned grassland understudied. In this study, an “Institutional Reliability of Natural Resource Governance” framework was developed and used to examine a state-owned farm in northern China as a case study, zooming into the nested “Employee Responsibility System” property right and its consequent impacts on tenure security and social identity, leading to changes in grassland use at both the individual household level and the collective level. Property rights insecurity and users’ identity dilemmas result in feedback of nonexcludability, increased cost, and adverse breeding structure, which jointly lead to environmental deterioration risk. Furthermore, laid-off employees’ collective action on utilizing common pastureland has come to fruition on resource conservation, and we found that elements such as common consensus, social capital, motivated authority, and rules-in-use help shape environmental conservation-oriented collective action. Our study introduces a previously unexplored nested property right regime incorporating an employee responsibility system in a state-owned farm. It emphasizes how property right and social identity jointly shape resource use at collective and individual household levels, ultimately influencing the sustainability of resource use.
Rangelands, covering 54% of the Earth’s terrestrial surface, are experiencing severe degradation worldwide, with overgrazing being one of the primary drivers. Collective action has shown potential in improving natural resource management, contributing to the wellbeing of both people and the environment. Based on household survey data conducted between 2020 and 2022 in northern China, this study estimates the effects of collective action on herders’ livestock herding behavior. Employing propensity score matching to address self-selection bias, the finding indicates that collective action can reduce overgrazing, with joint management across herders being more effective than cooperatives. Furthermore, herders who have received limited educated, have low incomes and have family members in government leadership positions tend to benefit more from collective action. Additionally, the primary mechanism by which collective action mitigates overgrazing is through enhanced rotational grazing. The findings are relevant for addressing rangeland degradation globally, and shed light on creating a more inclusive society in pastoral communities through enhanced collective action.
The impacts of property rights on the sustainable management of natural resources has been debated for long, yet no consensus has been reached. Empirical observations reveal puzzling inconsistencies, as similar property regimes produce varying outcomes, whereas different property regimes can lead to similar results. A key reason for this inconsistency is that previous studies have often examined the impacts of property rights from a linear, one-directional approach, overlooking the complex interactions and interplay between property rights and other social, economic and environmental factors in a dynamic social‒ecological system. Thus, this study focuses on pastoral areas in China and explores how grassland property rights, adaptive grassland management strategies, and other biophysical factors jointly shape grassland ecology. Using data from 129 villages across four major pastoral provinces, we employed fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) to explore the diverse pathways leading to grassland sustainability or degradation and to investigate the complex causal relationships among factors. The paper offers the first empirical, village-level evidence on how property rights affect grassland quality, drawing on data from a nationwide village survey. The results reveal that the relationship between property right and grassland quality is not linear; instead, it varies depending on the complex interaction between property rights and broader socio-ecological context. Beyond the property right solution, the adaptive grassland management emerges as a crucial strategy, particularly in enhancing resilience and promoting sustainable grassland use under conditions of climate disaster or in communities where grassland size is limited.
