Adaptation to the Policy-oriented Livelihood Change in Xilingol Grassland, Northern China

Abstract

Abstract Grassland degradation intensifies human-environment conflicts and changes local residents’ livelihoods. To battle against the ever-severer grassland degradation in Northern China, the government has enforced a series of grassland conservation and management policies in the past 10 years. Taking the “Fencing grassland, forbidding grazing and moving user” policy executed in badly degraded Xilingol grassland as a case, we reviewed the influences of three policy scenarios, including 1) grazing resting in the light degraded grassland, 2) grazing prohibition and user moving in the severe degraded grassland, and 3) livestock rearing control in the neighboring farming zone. To ease livelihood shock after policies implementation, the local households spontaneously developed bottom up countermeasures. Meanwhile, the governments also offered a series of top down arrangements to ease the shocks and to advance local development. With sustainable livelihood approach, we analyzed the change of asset composition and alteration of diet structure, and assessed the livelihood sustainability with a mixed method of qualitative and quantitative analyses from aspects of livelihood diversity, livelihood elasticity and environmental sustainability. The results show that the implementation of grassland conservation policies has exerted great influences on local households’ livelihoods, ranging from asset composition change to fundamental living style transformation; and the involved households had to change their food consumption patterns and initialized a basket of strategies, such as off-farm works, pastureland leasehold and livestock entrustment to make up the livelihood decline. However, with less diversity and constrained elasticity, neither of the guided adjustment nor spontaneous adjustment could perform well enough to secure the livelihood sustainability, while maintaining the improved environment sustainability. Therefore, expanding livelihood diversity and improving elasticity are urgent to alleviate livelihood shocks and promote local development.