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Global warming and environmental deterioration have had an enormous impact on the Three Rivers Region. The rise of the monastic organizations in Tibet had its social-politic factors such as the international impacts on "Green Tibetan" movement, China's foreign non-governmental organizations (FNGO) policies, and the revitalization of Tibetan Buddhis...
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... 1989: 282. 9 Lind Jhonston, 2006: 69-99. 10 Martin Calvin, 1978: 20-27. 11 Graham Parkes,1998: 38. 12 Suo Darje, 2000 13 Le & Xing Ed., China's Ethnic Statistical Yearbook 2016 14 H. H. The 17 th Karmapa, 2009: 3. 15 Reza Hasmath, 2016: 43-56. 16 Pang Zhong, 2016 an altitude of 3802m, in the southeastern part of Golok TAP, Qinghai Province, PRC (Fig. ...
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... Local monasteries have a significant role in the daily lives of pastoralists and actively participate in decision-making processes related to land and other matters (Tsering, 2023;Tsering, 2019). Thus, Lumu village serves as a compelling case study that enables an exploration of the role of religious institutions in land governance, specifically examining their interactions with state institutions and pastoral communities. ...
... Since 2016, Lumu has received a handful of external policies and investment focused on conservation and development (Tsering, 2019). The influx of these government-led external projects altered not only the local pastoralists' relationship to the rangelands, but also the local monastery's position and relationship with the monastic village. ...
... The influx of these government-led external projects altered not only the local pastoralists' relationship to the rangelands, but also the local monastery's position and relationship with the monastic village. The monastery has traditionally acted as the 'guardian' of the land and has played a crucial role in Lumu's conservation and development over the past two decades (Tsering, 2019). ...
The governance of rangeland in Amdo, Tibet is characterised by constant negotiations and contestations, includ- ing resistance from below, and is shaped by various processes in the real-world context. Through the notion of assemblage, which involves bringing together an array of agents and objectives to intervene in social processes to produce desired outcomes and avert undesired ones, this paper adds to the existing body of research on land governance by examining how institutions are formed in the case of a hy- droelectric dam on the land of the pastoralists.
... In Lumu, the monastery serves as both the local authority and intermediator between the villages and local government. It takes these roles seriously and, consequently, the de facto use and access to resources is continuously negotiated and contested with the participation of various resource users (Tsering, 2019;Simula et al., 2020). In December 2019, Jab, the monastery secretary, concluded: ...
Gaining access to land for grazing is less straightforward than before and the individualized plot system does not allow the flexibility to manage grazing effectively. As a result, hybrid systems of rangeland governance have evolved. Such systems are neither private, nor communal, nor completely open property arrangements: they emerge from a negotiation between herd-owners, village heads, religious monastery leaders, government officials, and others. Institutional and organizational innovation therefore means that pastoralists can generate reliability in the face of new forms of variability and uncertainty.
... Gande county in Golok covers a land of 7046 km 2 and is home to 13 Tibetan Buddhist monasteries with a total of 2163 officially-registered monks 3 (Smith, 2013). As one of the earliest monasteries in the region, Shar monastery was founded in the mid-18th century, been destroyed in 1958, and then rebuilt following the end of the cultural revolution (Tsering, 2019). Shar monastery currently holds a total of 213 monks and shares a total of 5200 mu 4 of land after the rangeland use right contract policy in 1994. ...
... Since the 1980 s, the monastery and monastic elite have not just been engaged in macro-level policy implementation but also, in many cases, are highly involved in the everyday decision-making on rangeland control and governance. However, the scale of monastic involvement varies in different areas due to the influence of the local monasteries, the constraints from local government and the changing interdependent relationship between the monastery and the pastoral communities over time and space (Tsering, 2023b(Tsering, , 2019. ...
... Therefore, the monastery has no 10 ལྷ ་སྡ ེ ། (in English, the villages of the God), refers to the monastic villages, different from administrative villages. lhade provides yak butter, tsemba (Tibetan barley flour), and cash money to the monastery through a periodic almsgiving, and the monastery provides religious services in return (Tsering, 2019). 11 ཅང་སུ ། (in English, Jiangsu Province), one of the provinces from the Yangtze River Economic Zone, Jiangsu ranks number one for per capita GDP in China. ...
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.
... Prior to the 1950s, rangeland customary laws appeared to be concise and regional, based on historical records in Amdo (Yeh 2004;Yeh 2003;Yeh et al. 2017). Empirical and archived documents indicate that the customary laws from Golok was influenced by regional customs, taboos, ethics, codes of conduct and, sometimes, Dharma teachings from local monasteries (Bauer and Nyima 2011;Kabzung 2015;Tsering 2019). Often, it is difficult to differentiate customary law from local cultural traditions and monastic rules. ...
Hybrid land governance, mosaics, polycentrism have become ways to describe contemporary rangeland settings-ways of responding to uncertainties through flexible institutions, overlapping boundaries and an assembled, plural bricolage of practices. However, this is frequently thought to be recent, often arising from more formal, regulated systems, whether state, private or communal, and with well-defined land tenure regimes. This paper argues that hybridity (in various forms) has always been present in Amdo Tibet, despite the political changes over time and space. Hybridity is a necessary response to uncertainty and central to the utilisa-tion of variable resources, which is the core strategy of pastoralism. Yet the form of hybridity varies as it must be constructed in particular historical circumstances, constrained by political economic conditions between the feudal, collectivist, liberalised eras. Today's hybridity-and so contemporary rangeland use and management strategies-must be understood in this historical context, as an accretion of practices and strategies that have emerged over different eras.
This paper argues that everyday politics are instrumental in negotiating development outcomes despite the pervasive influence of centralised state power. The paper highlights the fluidity and adaptability of Chinese policy formulation, emphasizing local learning and improvisation. This is especially important for pastoral communities in remote rangelands, where land appropriation and environmental exploitation are increasingly evident. The paper sheds light on the influential role of everyday political practices in shaping outcomes within the Chinese context, while simultaneously contesting simplistic portrayals of top-down state planning in China. By emphasizing the existence of manoeuvrability and opportunities for negotiation within this framework, the paper advocates for a nuanced understanding of governance dynamics and power relations in the Chinese context.
