On the eastern Tibetan Plateau, two neighboring pastoral townships received essentially the same national policy: the Household Responsibility System, which grants herding households fixed-term land-use rights while the state retains ownership of the land. Yet over more than four decades, the two communities responded in strikingly different ways. One, Kocê Town in Xiahe County, Gansu Province, repeatedly readjusted its pasture allocations in response to surveying errors, population change, rising caterpillar fungus values, and state grassland subsidies. The other, Serlung Township in Henan Mongol Autonomous County, Qinghai Province, largely froze its initial allocation in place. A new comparative study argues that this divergence is not explained by history, ecology, or policy alone, but by the presence or absence of intermediary organizations capable of translating local demands into workable institutional arrangements.
The research, published in the journal Pastoralism, draws on fieldwork conducted in January 2025 and from July to October 2025, during which the author was based in Henan Mongol Autonomous County and traveled regularly among herding households, local archives, and government offices. Interviewees were recruited primarily through snowball sampling and included township and village-level officials who had directly participated in implementing and adjusting the Household Responsibility System, as well as local elders with firsthand memories of the institutional changes. Government documents and historical livestock statistics were collected from local archives and statistical yearbooks to complement the interviews. The author acknowledges that retrospective accounts remain subject to potential recall bias, and interview materials were coded to protect privacy. Seven townships were examined, and Kocê and Serlung were selected as the primary cases because they are geographically adjacent, subject to broadly similar formal policy frameworks, and yet developed markedly different grassland management arrangements.
The Household Responsibility System, introduced gradually in China from the 1980s, was designed to resolve the free-rider problem of the earlier collective model by giving herding households land-use rights for a fixed term, generally 50 years in pastoral areas and 30 years in agricultural areas. Following the 19th National Congress of the Communist Party of China in 2017, the second round of rural land contracts was extended for another 30 years upon expiration. But the system produced unintended consequences that generated persistent fairness pressures. Initial surveying methods were relatively crude, with boundaries often demarcated by hand gestures and visual estimation, so the validity of original demarcations came into question as more precise surveying technology arrived. Children born after the demarcation date received no share of pasture, and this group is now in their forties, making land redistribution an internal family matter that fragments some households’ pastures into small plots while others have a single heir.
Government pasture subsidies, allocated based on the area of pasture contracted in a given year, meant that households fortunate enough to secure larger pastures saw their income double. Meanwhile, the commercial value of caterpillar fungus, a wild high-value resource, was not recognized by the market during the early stages of the system, so it did not serve as a basis for the initial allocation. When the fungus became highly sought after and emerged as one of herders’ primary income sources, people began to reevaluate the rationality of the original allocation methods. The original allocation followed the logic that lowland pastures of good quality should be smaller in area while highland pastures of poor quality should be larger, and that safe pastures within the inner ring should be smaller while dangerous pastures along administrative boundaries should be larger. Today, caterpillar fungus has appeared in highland pastures, which have also become more habitable due to global warming, and pastures along administrative boundaries have become safer thanks to technological advancements such as barbed wire fencing. One elderly villager recalled that a household that ended up with a rocky patch nobody wanted became very wealthy several years later when caterpillar fungus became valuable, and that people see this as fate or pure luck.
Kocê Town, with a permanent resident population of 3,733 as of 2020, developed a tiered allocation system with continuous adjustment across pastures of different seasons. Allocation of winter pastures began as early as 1985 and was largely finalized by 1995; allocation of autumn pastures was not completed until 2016; and summer pastures remain under shared use to this day due to long-standing boundary disputes with neighboring communities. In 1991 and 1994, after errors in the initial surveying were discovered, some village groups corrected existing arrangements through pasture exchanges and reallocations, with herders voicing complaints, consulting local religious leaders, and exchanging pasture plots through lotteries to reach collective decisions. Since 2012, grassland ecological compensation and incentive funds have not been distributed strictly based on contracted pasture area but have instead been allocated primarily according to the current population. A local informant explained that a child receives a share upon birth and an elderly person’s share is removed upon death, with the total amount exceeding 11 million. During the fall 2016 grassland allocation, the local community again used the current population as the primary benchmark, proceeds from caterpillar fungus harvesting in some village groups are still shared collectively, and there have been discussions about readjusting winter pasture allocations based on current population figures in the future.
Serlung Township, part of Henan Mongol Autonomous County and comprising five administrative villages, also had a permanent resident population of 3,733 in 2020. With the exception of two villages that retained communal use of summer pastures, most villages adopted a one-time allocation method based on the compensation logic of allocating more to those with poorer-quality pastures and less to those with higher-quality pastures, dividing year-round pastures entirely among households. This initial allocation created a strong institutional lock-in effect: pasture boundaries, contracted areas, and household rights are largely determined by the initial allocation results, leaving relatively limited room for subsequent adjustments. Since 2012, grassland ecological subsidy and reward funds have been calculated primarily based on the area of contracted pastures, directly linking subsidy benefits to existing contracted areas. After 2016, in the two villages that retained communal summer pasture use, shares were not redistributed based on current population figures but instead retained the population benchmarks established during the initial allocation. Serlung thus developed a stabilization pathway centered on the initial allocation, treating the state’s initial allocation as the source of stable rights.
Local perspectives on pastureland readjustment differ sharply between the two townships. In Serlung, legitimacy derives primarily from the authority initially granted by the state. Herders generally use central government policy as their benchmark and view the freeze on property rights as an institutional constraint rather than a local choice, tracing the principle back to the official narrative of no changes for 50 years, extended by about 30 years. Individuals born after the contracting period are no longer regarded as potential rights holders, and herders view intra-family inheritance or redistribution as private arrangements rather than property rights practices on par with the state’s contracting system. Wealth disparities are explained through fatalistic narratives of fate or luck rather than the result of individual effort within a specific institutional structure. From the government’s perspective, the initial demarcation and allocation of pastures required large-scale administrative mobilization; one official involved in pasture contracting recalled that the initial demarcation mobilized over a thousand people and took a full three years to complete, making any attempt to refine or redistribute the pastures more than a decade later completely unfeasible given the existing policy framework and administrative burden.
Kocê reflects a fundamentally different view of pasture use rights. Locally, there is a stronger emphasis on the principle of a share for everyone, meaning pastures belong not only to family members present at the time of initial allocation but also to past, present, and future members of the community. Initial measurement errors, changes in birth rates and household size, the distribution of pasture subsidies, and disparities in income resulting from the rising value of caterpillar fungus have all facilitated further redistribution or new rounds of land arrangements. Village officials point out that contracting out pastureland does not equate to private property, as the pastures still retain their nature as collectively owned and public resources. Elderly villagers emphasized that the pastures are resources passed down from their ancestors and cannot be viewed merely as the fixed property of those present at the time of the initial allocation. Local officials generally allow a degree of autonomous arrangement as long as practices remain within established policy boundaries, and some locally developed practices, such as the Qianyangya livestock-recovery practice through which herders collectively identify and return livestock that have strayed into other herds, originated in the 1980s and were later incorporated into local conflict-resolution efforts and reported by state media.
The study argues that the key difference lies in intermediary organizations between the state and pastoral households. In Kocê, elderly herders make up about two-fifths of village-level organizations, and traditional authority continues to be recognized. This is not a natural continuation of traditional factors but is related to specific local governance needs: since summer pastures are still shared with neighboring communities, boundary disputes and conflicts over resource use occur from time to time, and local governance still relies on elderly herders who are familiar with historical boundaries, transhumance routes, household relationships, and local customs. Township officials emphasized in interviews that elderly herders play an irreplaceable role in mediating pasture disputes, conveying local opinions to higher authorities, and maintaining village order. These organizations are not merely administrative transmission mechanisms but negotiation platforms linking state policies, village organizations, and local norms. When Kocê decided to distribute grassland subsidies according to the current population rather than pasture area, county officials expressed concern because this differed from the practice adopted elsewhere, but local cadres defended the arrangement on distributive grounds, with one recalling that they said if anything went wrong they could take responsibility, as they were not putting the money into their own pockets but acting for the welfare and fairness of the community.
The study also considers and rejects alternative explanations. Historical continuity alone cannot explain the divergence, because Serlung exhibits a comparable degree of historical continuity: it belonged to the Mda’ tshan Banner, a subdivision of the Henan Mongol Banner, its administrative boundaries have remained largely unchanged, and descendants of the former tribal leadership continue to be recognized as respected village elders. Kocê similarly developed within historical institutional networks linking the Henan Mongol Banner, local Tibetan pastoral communities, and the Labrang monastic system. The study further draws on institutional bricolage and critical institutionalism to show that shifts in resource valuation merely alter local bargaining dynamics, while a larger underlying system regulates outcomes. The author concludes that institutional change does not occur solely in response to shifts in resource value; its pathways also depend heavily on the structural links between the state and society, and that the existence of intermediary organizations significantly influences the pace of institutional adjustment. Traditional resources can only be transformed into institutional outcomes when they are given space for expression within specific organizational structures, and the key to institutional differentiation lies not in the mere existence of tradition but in whether tradition can, through organizational forms, enter the arena of policy implementation and institutional reproduction.
Subject of Research: Comparative study of divergent pastureland property rights trajectories under the Household Responsibility System in two neighboring pastoral townships on the eastern Tibetan Plateau
Article Title: Divergent institutional trajectories under a common policy framework: a comparative study of two pastoral townships on the eastern Tibetan Plateau
Article References: Bande, T. (2026). Divergent institutional trajectories under a common policy framework: a comparative study of two pastoral townships on the eastern Tibetan Plateau. Pastoralism: Research, Policy and Practice, 16, Article 16810. https://doi.org/10.3389/past.2026.16810
Image Credits: AI Generated
Keywords: pastoralism, Tibetan Plateau, Household Responsibility System, property rights, institutional change, caterpillar fungus, grassland subsidies, intermediary organizations, local governance, rangeland management, China, comparative fieldwork
News Source: Courtney Benton. (November 6, 2026). Two neighboring Tibetan townships, one shared policy, and two very different fates for their grasslands. Scienmag.
