Tibetan buddhist monastery-based rangeland governance in Amdo Tibet, China

Abstract

The conventional understanding of governance highlights the state’s coercive and formal mechanisms. However, the everyday political control of the state is informal and ambiguous, and powerful civil societies strengthen resource governance through interactions between civil society, social organisations, and governments. In the case of pastoral Golok, China, the role of the local state is highly mediated by the power of the monastery and the monastic organisation, and much of the opportunities for compromise, negotiation and resistance on rangeland utilisation emerge from the ambiguities of land control, and different overlapping claims can be made through competing discourses on development and conservation.This paper applies a governance lens through the notion of assemblage to explore the roles of monasteries in rangeland governance. Multi cases were collected through in-depth interviews, focus groups, and participant observation as part of long-term ethnographic studies in 2020–2021. The study finds that monasteries in pastoral Golok provide room for manovre, shape the values and directions of resource governance, and the existence of monastic network and mediation is essential for negotiation-based rangeland management and land policy. These findings provide a nuanced foundation for rangeland management, policy, and politics in the Tibetan-Chinese context.