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OVER TIME AND SPACE: HYBRID RANGELAND
GOVERNANCE IN AMDO TIBET
Palden Tsering (Huadancairang)
[Winner Of The Cnp/pasTres sTudenT essay prize 2022]
Abstract
Hybrid land governance, mosaics, polycentrism have become ways to
describe contemporary rangeland settings – ways of responding to un-
certainties through exible 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-dened land tenure re-
gimes. 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 contem-
porary 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.
KEYWORDS: Rangeland governance, hybridity, land tenure regimes,
Amdo Tibet, China, pastoralism
Introduction
The notion of hybridity has surfaced in resource governance studies in the
twenty-rst century, particularly among researchers specialising in common-
pool resource management. The presence of several institutions in rural settings
and their interconnections in land control is characterised as polycentrism
(Ostrom 2010): in other words, there is no single crucial governing authority.
Instead, the governance of land and natural resources is ‘enacted through a va-
riety of state and non-state actors with plural congurations of laws, rules, and
procedures, as well as a diversity of uses and values’ (Cleaver et al. 2013:168).
Hybridity is not simply a fusion of the ‘two forms’ of bureaucracy and tra-
dition, but rather a matter of sources of authority acting concurrently and
NOMADIC PEOPLES 27 (2023): 73–94 doi: 10.3197/np.2023.270105
Open Access, CC BY-NC 4.0 © [Palden Tsering (Huadancairang)]
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Palden Tsering (Huadancairang)
74 Nomadic Peoples 27 No.1 (2023)
becoming co-constitutive through order making processes. Hybridity refers to
‘institutional arrangements for governing rather than the multiplicity of formal
or informal institutions, the cooperation and competition between informal
and formal institutions to ll gaps in state capacity’(Albrecht and Moe 2015;
Meagher, Herdt, and Titeca 2014:19), and the various links between state and
non-state systems (Meagher et al. 2014:19). Meagher and colleagues focused
on ‘arrangements that work’ in fragile areas of Africa, shifting the attention
from ‘form to function’, claiming that the suboptimal hybrid arrangement,
such as rebel militia engaging in taxation and service provision, is preferable
to the total collapse of services of the State (Meagher et al. 2014). Although
Meagher et al. highlight the nature of hybridity in a very different context of
state fragility and insecurity, their perspectives are still useful for clarifying the
nature of hybridity in the realm of resource governance.
Hybrid land governance is a way to describe contemporary rangeland settings
– a way of responding to uncertainties through exible institutions, overlapping
boundaries and an assembled, plural bricolage of practices. But very often it is
assumed that this is recent – emerging out of more formal, regulated systems,
whether state, private, or common, and where property rights are dened and
clear. To collect data, I spent thirteen months in the eld, moving between dif-
ferent pastoral settings in Golok, and living with pastoralists from these settings
on their winter and summer pastures, in tents during summer-time and concrete
houses during winter-time. I also spent seven months in Xining1 where I com-
bined writing-up with interviews with provincial and prefectural ofcials. This
research uses a multi-case ethnographic approach and mixed methods, com-
bining various qualitative and participatory techniques. For instance, historical
interviews and archival research were used to review the history of rangeland
governance in Amdo. Household surveys were particularly used for the details
of rangeland allocation. In-depth interviews were crucial for the collection of
multiple empirical cases, with a total of 125 recorded interviews, and a total of
forty in-depth interviews with detailed descriptions.
This research shows that hybridity (in different forms) has always existed,
despite very different regimes over time and space. Hybridity is a necessary
response to uncertainty – and central to the governance of variable resources
– the core strategy of pastoralism2 (Krätli and Schareika 2010; Gongbuzeren,
Wenjun and Yupei 2021; Gongbuzeren, Zhuang and Li 2016). Yet the form of
hybridity varies as it must be constructed in particular historical circumstances,
constrained by political economic conditions between the feudal, collectivist
and liberalised eras. Thus, this paper highlights that today’s hybridity – and so
1 Xining Shi, 西宁市, ཟི་ལིང་། the capital city of Qinghai Province.
2 Gregorini et al. (2022: 1) dene pastoralism as ‘as the extensive production of domestic
livestock, primarily dependent on the grazing of natural forages’.
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75Nomadic Peoples 27 No.1 (2023)
contemporary rangeland use and management strategies – must be understood
in this historical context, as an accretion of practices and strategies that have
emerged over the feudal, communal and household contract eras.
The Feudal Era
Many historians and scholars describe the tribe-centred, pre-1950s social
system in Tibet as ‘a feudal serf system’ (Li et al. 2007; Miehe et al. 2009).
However, one has to understand the tsowa3 system to investigate rangeland
practices during the so-called feudal era. The tsowa system was an important
social structure comprising the interdependent relationships between the mon-
astery, tribal leaders and their members, and this system had played a crucial
role in rangeland governance before the 1950s. Although the tsowa structure
is persistent, it has been transformed and reinvented throughout history to help
pastoralists in confronting uncertainties and catastrophes.
Prior to the 1950s, rangeland in Amdo was held as common property, and
different authorities including the monasteries, regional chieftains and the kar-
sha4 played fundamental roles in enforcing laws and regulations on rangeland
governance. However, many empirical studies indicate that access and use
rights were often in the hands of tsowa and its leaders (Ekvall 1939; Yeh 2003;
Cheng 2002), and patterns of authority varied greatly across space and time
within the tsowa. As Ekvall (1939: 50), a missionary anthropologist who lived
in Amdo throughout the 1930s and 1940s described, the overall tsowa struc-
ture was one of alliances, warfare, feuding and overlapping spheres of political,
military and religious inuences (1939; 1964; 1968). Ekvall also wrote, ‘tsowas
were quite independent in Amdo; although they can hardly establish its rights
to grazing privileges without the consent of the tribe as a whole, it can, being
nomadic, always secede and go somewhere else’ (quoted from Yeh 2003: 510).
According to Yeh’s study in Amdo, ‘some tsowas had groups of elders who
acted either as advisers to a chief, or in place of one. Some chiefs had such
extended power that they were known instead as “king”. Most chiefs were he-
reditary, but some were also elected’ (Yeh 2003: 511). Not all tsowas existed as
3 Tsowa, in the Tibetan context, refers to the basic pastoral economic unit before the 1950s.
‘At the lowest level, encampments (ru skor) typically consisted of ve to ten patrilineally-
related households and constituted the basic pastoral economic unit. Encampments were
usually aggregated into higher-order groups or “tribes”, referred to as “tsowa” in Tibetan’
(sic) (Yeh 2003: 510; Gruschke 2008), and these tsowas were, in turn, aggregated into bigger
‘confederacies’ or ‘unions’. For example, Golok had a total of 235 tsowas before 1958
(Guoluo News 2015).
4 Karsha, བཀའ་ཤག or 噶厦, refers to the central Tibet government before 1959.
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76 Nomadic Peoples 27 No.1 (2023)
part of larger unions: many were independent for periods of time. Large tsowas
split into smaller ones due to resource scarcity, external intrusions and internal
disputes, and small encampments grew into large tsowas to form confederacies
to confront natural disasters and political turmoil; it was common that pastoral-
ists, under such turbulent conditions, would ee from one and join others (Xing
1994). Although this created a mosaic of social territorial structure and identi-
ties, a reciprocal, mutual and interdependent relationship between the alleged
resource controllers and actual users existed, and these determined pastoralists’
access rights to rangeland and other resources (Cheng 2002).
In Amdo, these different arrangements or sources of authority negotiate to
create a well-oiled system that assists pastoralists in dealing with uncertainty.
Numerous scholars have noted that, prior to the establishment of the PRC, the
practice of authoritative powers over rangeland control and access was highly
dependent on the mediation of intermediaries (Grifths 2020; Palace 2001;
Weiner 2020), in this case, local organisations, such as tsowas, the elite and
religious institutions. Meanwhile, local authorities deployed existing practices,
understanding and relationships to extract the requisite minimum of tribute,
military support and loyalty for the centre’s benet (Tilly 1997). Among
these local actors, chieftains played a critical role in determining the use of
and access to rangeland in Amdo. Some chieftains, as authorised governors,
hold authorised rights from the ruling powers; these rights include land con-
trol and judiciary power, combined religious and political power. Chieftains
practise their authority through land distribution, adjustment, leasing and taxa-
tion. These hierarchical, indigenous leaders were not the only authorised land
allocators before the 1950s – monasteries and monastic leaders also played
signicant roles in rangeland governance.
Monasteries and their emissaries had controlled the political elds of
Tibet before 1959, where monasteries and monastic representatives had be-
come dominant rulers in both religious and political arenas (Goldstein 1989;
Goldstein 1997; Hillman 2005; Jansen 2018). These practices resulted in the
promotion of local monastic roles in resource governance: together with secu-
lar tsowa and sub-tsowa leaders, religious leaders practised genuine authority
over resource allocation and supervision. Through the allocation and super-
vision processes, decision-makers, such as the tsowa and sub-tsowa leaders,
started to cut taxation and possess private parcels as remuneration for their
dedication to tribal affairs. This also resulted in the monasteries accumulating
resources, as tsowa leaders demanded additional land from the tribe to offer
to the monastery as endowment and alliance-seeking. The monastery, in turn,
used the land for monastic business and livestock herding, employing vul-
nerable pastoral households that moved and assembled around the monastery,
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77Nomadic Peoples 27 No.1 (2023)
gradually forming the ‘tawa’5 community. Many tawas became monastic
herders before the 1950s in Golok. As eighty-year-old Uncle Jo recalled his
childhood life in tawa,
We lived very close to the Lunmo Chee River, and there was only a total
of 30 tawa households when I was little. The monastery gave us a few cat-
tle, and my father helped herding the monastic livestock while my mom
helped milking and making butter and cheese with other tawa families. We
had enough food for the family, but being a tawa meant more than that, my
father moved to tawa from a nearby village because the monastery offered
him refuge from the wars. And my parents enjoyed being tawas, and this
led them to a peaceful twilight year.6
As Uncle Jo’s quote shows, the dynamics between the empire and the local
society were entangled by the empire’s frequent investment in the local secular
and religious elite through handing out titles7 (Zhang 1989), honours, seals and
rewards. This is not to say that empires exercised direct control over tsowas;
rather, for hundreds of years, these tsowas remained substantially unsupervised
by imperial authorities (Weiner 2020). Chieftains practised their on-the-ground
rights through established power relations and tsowa acknowledgements. To
be precise, as oral histories from pastoral Golok and Kokonor indicate, chief-
tains had the authority to allocate pastures in the tsowa, as well as to distribute,
adjust, lease and tax land. Additionally, as documented in the customary laws
of Golok, different land tenure regimes existed over time as a result of diverse
geographic, ethnic, socioeconomic and political circumstances.
The tsowa customary laws provide additional insight into the internal vari-
ance and exibility of rangeland governance in Amdo. Tsowa customary law
was often drafted (written or unwritten) and announced by chieftains, with
negotiations and consultation from sub-tribe leaders, and occasionally with
the monastic institutions. These laws were enforced by tribal forces, such as
5 མཐའ་བ། Tawa, is a type of Tibetan social construction; it refers to communities located around
a monastery. It has its own characteristics, which are basically embodied in its reliance on the
monastery for both material and non-material development.
6 Interview, Uncle Jo, Golok, May 2020.
7 1) Chieftains (ཚོ་དཔོན་དང་དཔོན་པོ།), ‘tso dpon’ or ‘hon po’ in Tibetan, are the leaders of a few
allied tsowas (unions or confederacies). ‘hon po’ has administrative, diplomatic, juridical and
militia power. However, this power is also constrained by the tsowa unions, provincial and
central governments; 2) A sub-tsowa leader is leader of a smaller ‘tsowa,’ which contains a
total of 30–50 households. The sub-tsowa leader is responsible for allocation and governance
of land; matters of violation of regulations, such as theft or robbery; religious affairs; military
force; and participating in meetings and decision-making; 3) The intra-tsowa is leader of the
‘ru skor,’ or the encampment, usually an average of 10 households. The intra-tsowa leader
was selected by the pastoral households, and some were directly assigned from above. These
intra -tsowa leaders were considered ‘civil servants’, usually in charge of production and
religious affairs on the ground (extracted and collated from Zhang 1989; Cheng 2002).
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78 Nomadic Peoples 27 No.1 (2023)
the tribal militia or, on some occasions, by religious gures from local mon-
asteries, such as Tulku8. These laws operated on a bottom-up basis, usually
based on ‘practical agreement’ with the populace, and implementation by peo-
ple through everyday life. Thus, tsowa customary law was signicant before
the 1950s and resultant context-specic regulations and strategies for pastoral
production and land management have evolved since then.
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 inuenced 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 difcult to differ-
entiate customary law from local cultural traditions and monastic rules. This
hybrid form of the customary laws not only strategically increased public ac-
ceptance and feasibility of the rules, but also created exibilities on the ground
through pastoralist inclusion in religious activities and relationships with the
monastery. Thus, diverse framings of rights coexist in plural contexts, and they
converge, overlap and create opportunities for bricolage.
Context-specic and improvised customary laws were functioning, based
on the needs and interests of pastoralists in particular places. Moreover, ar-
chived data showed that different pastoral tsowas had distinct forms, processes
and measurements of rules as a result of the diversity of pastoral production,
social-economic life and social habits. For example, Moba customary law in
Golok,9 emphasised land ownership, access rights and the penalties for illegal
grazing as detailed below.
Rangeland belongs to the tsowa, and livestock should be kept within the
tsowa rangeland; if anyone crosses the boundary and grazes their livestock,
a yak should be paid as a penalty to the landowner; no one shall herd yak
and sheep around the tribe leader’s tent, a yak should be paid as a penalty.
If it was a horse, then its tail should be cut; anyone herding livestock on the
tsowa leaders’ rangeland should have 30% of the livestock conscated.10
Even though the law stated unequivocally that the rangeland belonged to the
tsowa in Moba, the law was determined to emphasise the chieftains’ and tsowa
leaders’ power by enforcing penalties for grazing livestock on the chieftains’
8 Tulku སྤྲུལ་སྐུ། 转世活佛, literally means the ‘apparitional body’, refers to an incarnated bo-
dhisattva who works for the welfare of sentient beings.
9 འབོ་སྤ་ཚོ་བ།ད་ལྟའི་མགོ་ལོག་དར་ལག་ན། 莫巴部落，为果洛阿琼部落分支。Moba, a tsowa in Darlag
Golok.
10 Texts are extracted from《果洛阿什郡贡玛部落法规天之准绳不变金刚》and translated
by the author.
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79Nomadic Peoples 27 No.1 (2023)
land. Another tsowa, Akyung in Golok enacted distinct regulations governing
tribal rangeland ownership, use and measurement:
The land and water of the tsowa is a public asset. The leaders of the tsowa
should divide the land into seasonal use. All families shall gather together
and move together. Land shall be distributed according to the family sta-
tus, more land for the poor and less for the rich. Whoever moves privately
or invades others’ land shall be punished; during the summer season, all
sub-tribe horses shall be herded together on summer pasture, and grazing
shall be banned on winter pasture. Whoever uses the winter pasture in
summer shall be punished; families should move according to the arrange-
ment of the tsowa leader; disputes between sub-tribes shall be mediated by
the tsowa leaders, and sub-tribes shall obey the leaders. Whoever crosses
the boundary shall be punished by conscating livestock or cutting off the
livestock’s tails.11
Rangeland in Akyung was under common use and the land was governed
by the tsowa. The law indicated a tendency toward equal distribution and
utilisation of rangeland. As illustrated by the laws above, these two pastoral
tsowas had distinct arrangements and measurements for rangeland govern-
ance. To begin with, both tsowas claried that rangeland boundaries between
tsowas and sub-tribes were demarcated, and rangeland was divided into each
sub-tribe according to the number of the people and livestock. Secondly, as the
Moba customary law explained, chieftains and tribal leaders seized privileges
of excludability, thus excluding the majority from herding on their pasture, and
forming a practice of privatisation in the tsowa, whereby access to the land of
chieftains and sub-tribe leaders was prohibited. Thirdly, when tsowa members
violate customary law, disciplinary measures such as nes and asset forfeiture
are listed. Lastly, distinct management rules exist, for example, in Akyung
tsowa, rangeland and water belong to all tsowa members, and the tsowa decides
to use and move between different pastures through collective negotiations.
Chieftains had the authority to seize and reclaim the land if someone vio-
lated the tsowa’s rules. Adjustment is also included when a right to lease is
granted. For instance, when pastoralists with a shortage of rangeland wanted
to rent land from the better-off, they were required to negotiate with chieftains.
Conrmation of the leasehold should be made by the leaders, or the land trans-
fer was considered a violation. However, chieftains’ positions as appointed
and authorised land managers came with ground privilege. These privileges in-
cluded the right to benet from pre-selected land and the right to retain control
and use of the tsowa’s best pasture. Chieftains promulgated tsowa custom-
ary laws after consulting with sub-tribe leaders and, on occasion, monastic
11 Texts are extract and translated from《果洛阿什郡贡玛部落法规天之准绳不变金刚》by
the author.
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80 Nomadic Peoples 27 No.1 (2023)
institutions. Bottom-up execution of these laws relied heavily on ‘practical
agreement’ with the masses and their implementation in daily life. This is cru-
cial because it demonstrates how concepts such as assemblage, bricolage and
so on emerge from a longer history of diverse parties bargaining for access.
These documented (written or unwritten) customary laws illustrate the di-
versity and multiplicity of institutional arrangements governing rangeland use
and access in Golok. The improvisation of different laws, rules and relation-
ships between central and marginal areas is key for these hybrid arrangements.
Additionally, as stated previously, the historical context is critical for accommo-
dating and constructing hybrid rangeland governance in Amdo. The geopolitical
distance of central government, political unrests (at regional, national and inter-
national levels in the mid-twentieth century) and the uctuating relations between
the central and marginal authorities had created spaces for complex resource and
rangeland governance. All this is to say that pastoralists were active and exible
in accommodating and customising different ways to benet from the resources,
whether from selling labour, entrusting livestock or renting rangeland from the
well-off families and monasteries. This is to suggest that, although the claimed
ve per cent of the population controlled the most land in Tibet, use of and
access to land and livestock was exible and dynamic on the ground, and pasto-
ralists were more engaged than might otherwise be assumed.
Unlike the standard, labelled feudal rangeland governance, rangeland prac-
tices in Amdo before the 1950s were messy and complex in all aspects. Under
the tsowa system, customised arrangements for rangeland control and access
existed, and hybrid practices on the ground were heavily inuenced by the
political socio-economic uncertainties, wealth disparities and political power
between ruling elite, monasteries and pastoralists (Wiley 1984). Although
tsowa customary laws indicated that authorised actors, such as karsha, mon-
asteries and local elite claimed ownership of the land, property practices were
exible and dynamic. Pastoralists have always negotiated forms of hybrid ten-
ure via interactions with different institutions, in order to remain exible and
continue with pastoral production. Rangeland renting, labour trading, livestock
entrusting and loan-taking were some of the fundamental strategies by which
to gain access to rangeland during the feudal era.
The Commune Era
The establishment of the communist-led People’s Republic of China and land
reform in the late 1940s ended the traditional tsowa property rights systems in
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81Nomadic Peoples 27 No.1 (2023)
Tibet by abolishing the roles of chieftains and the monastic elite.12 Beginning
in the late 1950s, the tsowa system was recongured by the assertion of state
power, with continuous involvement in controlling and managing rangelands
through production brigades, production teams and different scales of com-
munes. This shifted rangeland ownership from tsowa and monastery to the
central state and state-collective ownership.13 However, different views on
which rangeland is state-owned and which is collectively owned, and contra-
dictions around the ownership rights and use rights, remain (Ho 2000; Banks
2003; Chen and Zhu 2015).
The commune-brigade system was established in the late 1950s, en-
forced by government policies; management of land use, cultivation and
animal husbandry was under the plans of the government. When the ‘Great
Leap Forward’14 was launched, the ‘higher agricultural production co-oper-
atives were overnight organised into people’s communes. The communes
owned all the means of production in their territory, sometimes encompassed
ten to twenty villages and had an average population of 25,000 people’ (Ho
2000:247). As a state policy that determined to uplift the economy through the
concentrated workforce in China, the land tenure system, during the collectiv-
ist period, (although never formally incorporated in law), had consequences
in famine, overgrazing and rangeland degradation, especially in those areas
where the grazing land was being taken for state farms or suffered through
inappropriate cultivation practices (Gov 2018). In the early 1960s, the ‘Great
Leap Forward’ faltered and land and livestock were concentrated in the hands
of the production brigades (equivalent to the current administrative village)15
and production teams (equivalent to the present natural village).16
Rangeland was brought under state control and managed by state collectives
during the commune era (Tumur et al. 2020). State collectives regulated all as-
pects of pastoral production, including pasture allocation, seasonal movements,
12 The timing of land reform for grazing lands differed across various pastoral regions. Inner
Mongolia from 1947–1952; Xinjiang from 1953–1954; Qinghai from 1952–1958; Sichuan
from 1955 – 1960; and TAR from 1959–1961 (Ho 2000).
13 ‘Disagreement exists over the exact meaning of “collective ownership” in China, which
makes it difcult to specify which administrative unit has de facto use rights, let alone
ownership rights. In rural settings alone, the term “collective” refers simultaneously to
several administrative levels and units: the township, the administrative village, the natural
village, and any collective township and village enterprise’ (Ho 2000: 247).
14 Da yue jin大跃进,‘The great leap forward disaster, characterised by a collapse in grain
production and a widespread famine in China between 1959–1961, is found attributable
to a systemic failure in central planning. Wishfully expecting a great leap in agricultural
productivity from collectivisation, the Chinese government accelerated its aggressive
industrialisation timetable’ (Li and Yang 2005: 840).
15 Xing Zheng Cun 行政村
16 Zi Ran Cun 自然村
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82 Nomadic Peoples 27 No.1 (2023)
milking schedules and herding locations. A xed, mechanised rangeland and
livestock management system was dominant. Since 1962, the commune sys-
tem served as the basic accounting unit in more than ninety per cent of rural
China (Zweig 1983). This centralised rangeland governance restructured the
interdependent, reciprocal relationship between monastery, tsowa leaders and
tsowa members into a production and income-induced mechanism. Under
this system, each herder became a commune labourer whose livelihood was
dependent on communal labour. A complex system of ‘work points’ was im-
plemented by the commune, with each commune task being assigned a value
from one to ten points, and each labourer earning points based on the type and
duration of work performed. As 79-year-old uncle Jibo in Kokonor recalled
during an interview:
We were gathered in the commune every day, and we each had different
assignments. Together with other six men from the village, we were in
charge of grazing the livestock on the commune pasture (which used to be
the tsowa’s common pasture), and then gathering the animals before dusk.
The commune would give us some tsamba17 every day, and 2–3 points for
each of the herders.18
Jibo’s quote also resonates with contemporary research on production
processes during the commune era. The commune provided food and other
necessities based primarily on work points and basic ration amount, and many
scholars conclude that herders did not own livestock and had no say in land use
or the seasonal movement (Kreutzmann 2012: 264; Kreutzmann, et al. 2011).
However, ethnographic studies reveal different pictures of the communes. As
Zhang (1998) wrote in his book, Say Goodbye to Utopia,19 ‘production teams
used traditional farming methods and followed natural rhythms to rotate crops
through their land’ (Chang 2013: 4). Yet, although the institution of production
teams gave stability to the people’s communes, it was unable to eradicate the
traditional and customary practices. Rural people, as Zhang highlighted from
cases in China’s agricultural regions, acted like detached individuals through
resistance and everyday politics and thus coped with changing circumstances
and created different ways or mechanism to deal with uncertainties. This was
also seen in Ekvall’s (1964; 1983) research in pastoral Tibet, as he wrote,
…in late 1963, when all of Tibetan agricultural regions had been fully
collectivised, the nomads were still being allowed private ownership of all
17 རྩམ་པ། 糌粑 The roasted barley our.
18 Interview, Uncle Jibo, Kokonor, May 2020.
19 Say Goodbye to Utopia (Zhang Letian, Dongfang Publication Press, 1998); ‘告别理想：人
民公社制度研究, gaobie lixiang: renmin gongshe zhidu yanjiu’ (Zhang Le Tian, Dongfang
Chuban Zhongxin, 1998).
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83Nomadic Peoples 27 No.1 (2023)
their stock, and were told that, if they would just keep producing animal
products in ever increasing quantities, they were under no pressure to ac-
cept immediate socialisation of their economy (1983: 97).
This is to say that, while planned economies dominated the country, par-
ticularly in agricultural regions, pastoral regions had relatively autonomous
and exible production models of private ownership and customised property
practices, so, hybridity was being practised. This is also conrmed by Yokar,
a 73-year-old female interlocutor in Kokonor:
Despite the fact that they (the commune leaders) were authorities in the
communes, and they were the people who gave daily-errands to the pas-
toralists, they had no clue about the livestock and the land. Because the
majority of them came from agricultural regions, and thus (due to the lack
of local, pastoral knowledge) they had to consult the elders in the village
for advice. They did not even know when to move to the highlands (the
alpine meadow summer pastures) and what to do during heavy snow-
storms. As a result, they had to consult village pastoralists to secure the
commune’s productivity.20
As Ama Yokar’s quote reveals, rangeland management practices were hy-
brid under the regulated commune property rights system. Although pastoralists
did not own land and livestock, as Ekvall claimed, at least not in the Golok and
Kokonor part of Amdo, pastoralists played a signicant role in livestock and
rangeland management. Due to commune ofcials’ lack of local knowledge,
particularly regarding pastoral production, local pastoralists were elevated to
be included in decision-making processes due to their conventional knowledge
and expertise about seasonal migration, herding arrangements and tactics to re-
spond to natural disasters. These traditional practices persisting throughout the
commune period, however, differed from those of the tsowa era. Pastoralists in
Amdo did not simply offer labour, they were also signicantly involved, on a
daily basis, in pastoral arrangement and production in the commune.
The people’s communes were eventually disbanded in 1983 in China
(Chang 2013). During the collectivist period, the primary pastoral production
units, rangeland and livestock were mainly owned by state collectives, and
collective leaders regulated pasture allocation, seasonal movement and daily
pastoral production. As some studies and interviews from different pastoral
settings reveal, however, hybrid rangeland practices did exist, whether it was
private land and livestock ownership in some pastoral regions, or a combina-
tion of collective and customary practices. Thus, while the state collectives
dominated land and livestock control during the commune era, rangeland prac-
tices remained exible to a degree.
20 Interview, Ama Yokar, Kokonor, May 2020.
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84 Nomadic Peoples 27 No.1 (2023)
The Grassland Household Contract Era
From the late 1970s, the Chinese government started to replace the commune
system (Clarke 1987) with the ‘Household Responsibility System’21 (Yongjun
2011) and, later on, the ‘Grassland Household Contract’ (GHC) policy in
pastoral regions nationwide. The commune-owned livestock was allocated to
individual households in the early 1980s, and rangelands were contracted to
each administrative village, a category that derived from the previous pro-
duction teams (Meng 2019). This policy was aimed at enabling herders with
greater incentives in production through granting individual households long-
term land use rights under rural collective landownership.
The rst round of the household contract was introduced to China’s agrar-
ian regions in 1978, and the second round included the pastoral regions,
starting from 1993, though the exact time of policy implementation varied on
the ground. Rangelands on some of the Tibetan Plateau were left to communal
use until 1993: as Goldstein (2012: 4) describes the vision of the GHC policy,
‘the government’s rationale was that if each nomad household controlled its
own pastureland, it would be motivated to invest time and resources to im-
prove the quality of the vegetation and animals’. Even though GHC brought
economic benets, many criticise its acceleration of rangeland degradation on
the plateau (Banks et al. 2003). In 1985, China’s ‘grassland law’ further accel-
erated the practice of GHC in all Tibetan regions. Rangeland privatisation had
shifted ‘common resources into discrete parcels, restricting access by livestock
to different seasonal pastures and water resources and affecting both animal
productivity and pasture condition’ (Galvin 2008: 5).
The redistribution took place based on the number of persons per house-
hold in 1984. About 20 sheep units were available per person.22
As Apa Tse remembers above, all livestock owned and managed by com-
munes since the late 1950s was distributed to commune members between
1982–1984. Each member was issued with a contract by the village or town-
ship committee in charge of livestock redistribution. Contracts began by
specifying the village or township and the household concerned. They then
stated how many sheep, yaks and horses the household was receiving from the
commune and how many animals the household had contributed to the com-
mune at the time of its establishment, the difference between the number of
animals received back in 1983–1984 and the number rendered to the commune
being taken as the basis for calculating the annual payment to be made. After
21 As the core land tenure regime in China, peasants from an agricultural village tested the
Farmland Household Contract System in 1978 (Song and Zhang 2002).
22 Interview, Apa Tse, Kokonor, Dec. 2019.
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85Nomadic Peoples 27 No.1 (2023)
the privatisation of livestock in the early 1980s, whereby grazing land was
left under communal use in most pastoral regions, came the contraction of the
rangeland on the ground in the early 1990s.
By May 2013, approximately 97 per cent of rural land in China was
contracted (Ministry of Land and Resources 2018). Contracts are issued to indi-
vidual households, but for about one-third of all rangeland in the Kokonor and
Golok area, the contracts are shared by small groups of ‘households,’ often with
three to six families or encampments (Yeh 2013); thus, rangeland was mainly
allocated to families, but rarely to individual households.23 These families are
related by family ties, and they help each other in many activities including
livestock migration and rangeland management (Cao et al. 2018). Cao et al.
emphasised the achievement of a multi-household management pattern, which
inherits the ‘traditional management practices, social networks, trust and the
low cost and high efciency of informal institutions, which acted to reduce
the risk of unsustainable development of ecological and social system’ (2018:
88). According to their research, two rangeland management patterns emerged
in Tibet after the implementation of the GHC policy – the multi-household
management pattern, and the single-household management pattern (2018).
However, a mix of these patterns had existed before the 1950s in pastoral
Amdo, where tsowa members collectively used pastures and grazed animals.
The dismantling of the collectives created a regulatory vacuum in range-
land management. Herders assumed responsibility for all inputs, uncertainties
and decisions relating to production, such that tsowa customary laws, the roles
of monasteries and informal norms of land use re-emerged. This is to say that
practices of rangeland governance are not constrained within the standard
household contract system. In the case of Lumu, after nearly forty years of
the household contract policy, rangeland, especially the summer pasture and
monastic land are still under collective use. According to to Apa Kunbo,24 one
of the village leaders,
Summer pasture here [in Lumu] is much smaller than the winter pasture,
so it is not feasible to privatise it to individual households. Moreover, we
only use summer pasture for a total of two months each year. Therefore, it
is wise to leave the comparatively smaller summer pasture under collec-
tive use.
According to Apa Kunbo, besides the matter of the size of summer pasture,
23 Interview, Kunbo and Bam, former Village Leader and Party Secretary, Golok and Kokonor,
Dec. 2019. According to Apa Kunbo, the reasons for the collective use of the Summer pasture
in Lumu include historical dynamic changes to demographic composition; the inheritance of
community use of natural resources; and the scarcity of summer pasture in comparison to
winter pasture.
24 Interview, Apa Kunbo, Kokonor, Sept. 2020.
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86 Nomadic Peoples 27 No.1 (2023)
another reason for leaving summer pasture under collective use is due to the
conventional demarcation of sacred sites in the region, as Apa Yondan,25 a tawa
member near Shar monastery explained,
Part of the summer pasture used to belong to the monastery, and it is a
piece of sacred land that is always protected by local deities. So, we cannot
contract it to individual households or companies from outside, and it is
not right to use sacred lands for our own benet.
Unlike the denition of rangeland as usable land for animal grazing under
the contract policy and laws, these quotes demonstrate how perceptions of
land have evolved over time and space, from pure grazing land to sacred sites,
preserved areas and protected ecological zones. Thus, various perspectives in-
uence rangeland practices under state policies. This is to suggest that, while
xed regulations and contract systems aim to dene rangeland ownership and
user rights, they often overlook the intricate relationship between resource
users and their resources. In the case of Lumu, the rangeland’s use right was
contracted in the 1980s as part of the implementation of the household contract
responsibility (HCR) policy to individual pastoral households, the monastery
and Lumu, the administrative village. The contract species the location, size
and land types and the name of the contractor. The contract includes a fty-
year of use right guaranteed by the provincial people’s government, and the
contractor has the ultimate right to the use, lease,and transfer of the land under
HCR. However, empirical cases from Lumu show that, despite the various
contractors, the monastery has repeatedly been involved and consulted regard-
ing the use of and access to both private and communal land. For instance,
in the case of an eco-tourism centre, the county people’s government and the
Poverty Alleviation Bureau determined that the village contracted the piece of
rangeland for communal use under HCR, establishing the village as a legiti-
mate user of the land. Nevertheless, the village offered that piece of rangeland
to the monastery due to concern about demerit from herding livestock on the
religious site, given that that piece of land is considered sacred by the local
monastery. This shows that land is more than just a grazing pasture for the
pastoralists in Lumu; it also serves the monastery’s and pastoralists’ collec-
tively-valued purposes and this socially-constructed reality shapes land use
and access decisions, as in the case of offering pastureland to the monastery,
a collective behaviour that can only be explained by the monastery’s interde-
pendence with the monastic villages.
Different user groups experience land differently as a result of their
knowledge and relationship with the land, and this relational dynamic shapes
hybrid rangeland practices. And it is at this point that the realisation of this
25 Interview, Apa Yondan, Golok, July 2020.
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87Nomadic Peoples 27 No.1 (2023)
dynamic becomes signicant for policy process and land management. This
is also apparent from other recent research in pastoral Amdo. In their article,
Gongbuzeren and others argue that process of de-collectivisation was selec-
tive. Their ndings from two pastoral villages in Amdo show that embedding
market mechanisms within customary institutions has had notable benets
for the herders, because it is a better t to the coupled pastoral social-eco-
logical system (2015). Moreover, their recent research again emphasised the
importance of exible and inclusive land tenure policy that recognises the di-
verse local institutional arrangements (Gongbuzeren, Li and Li 2015). Their
cases recommend institutional changes that encourage the re-aggregation of
individual rangeland resources and restoration of community collective use
of rangelands (Qi and Li 2021). Maintained elements of the collective, such
as the collective use of rangelands and seasonal livestock mobility, while
still taking up the new policies are seen to be critical, in terms of produc-
tion, land management and land tenure security (Gongbuzeren et al. 2021).
Hybridity has persisted over time as a dening feature of rangeland govern-
ance, and the rejuvenation of the cooperation model in rural regions and the
ongoing property rights reform, all stems from the history of hybrid range-
land governance.
Hybridity Has Always Been There
Through a recap of the different eras of rangeland governance in Amdo, a
mixture of feudal, communal and private use of rangeland had been employed:
from the tsowa era before the 1950s, where land was owned by multiple ac-
tors with dynamic power relations for the use and access of land; then to the
commune era from the late 1950s to early 1980s, where land and means of
production were under the control of the state collectives, and private owner-
ship and customary practices remained to a degree (Cencetti 2015; Zhaoli et
al. 2005); and nally followed by the termination of the commune system,
or ‘de-collectivisation’ (Cencetti 2015; Levine 2015) and the initiation of the
rangeland household contract in most of the pastoral regions in the 1980s.
Throughout history, whether feudal, collectivist or de-collectivist, pas-
toralists have constructed hybrid rangeland governance through a variety
of diverse paths (see Table 1): for example, by tailoring connections with
the tsowa chieftains and monastery during the feudal period; by incor-
porating local practices during the commune period; and by customising
rules, relationships and roles to claim and maintain access to the resource.
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88 Nomadic Peoples 27 No.1 (2023)
Land Tenure System in Amdo
Time Ownership Users Institutions Social
Relations
Hybrid
Practices
Pre-1950s
‘Feudal Period’
Mix of
Karsha,
tsowa and
private
ownership.
Tribe
members
Tawa
communities
Customary
Law
Monasteries
Traditional
monastery,
monastic
tribes and tribe
leaders centred,
interdependent,
reciprocal and
mutual.
Through
trading labour;
livestock and
land entrusting;
becoming tawa;
and usury.
Late 1950s to
Early 1980s
‘Collectivist
Period’
State and
state-
collective
ownership
Commune
members,
production
brigades and
production
teams.
Commune
rules
production
team
regulations
The collective
as the ‘universal
capitalist’ and
the pastoralists
became
the ‘wage
labourers’.
Top-down
production
mechanism;
tribal system and
monasteries were
absent; xed,
mechanised
rangeland
and livestock
management was
dominant.
Post 1980s
‘De-collectivisation
period’
Use
rights to
households.
Village;
pastoralists
with
contracted
use rights.
Land contract
law;
customary
law and
practices;
government;
management;
regulations;
Interdependent
relationship
between
monastery
and monastic
villages;
monastery as
intermediator.
A mix of the old
and new;
household
contract for the
legal perspective;
and complex
practices with
exibility and
complexity on
the ground.
Table 1.
Control and access to rangeland from 1940 to the present.
As the above table shows, hybridity emerged in all periods through dif-
ferent routes. In all cases hybridity was a compromised and negotiated social,
political outcome but, whether by the monasteries, the state or the commune,
this was allowed (even if not formally accepted) – because hybridity was nec-
essary for production and livelihoods, living with and from uncertainty. Each
period was labelled and associated with a particular tenure, no matter whether
it was communal, collective or private property rights. Although conditioned
by the historical socio-political context, property practices in real-world situ-
ations were hybrid.
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89Nomadic Peoples 27 No.1 (2023)
Conclusion
Through bibliographic and archived documents from two pastoral settings
in Amdo, this paper demonstrates that ‘land tenure security’26 did not take
complete control; that is to say, control over land was not monopolised by
a few local elite but, rather, access and use were spread much more widely
amongst various community members, and spaces were available to negotiate
access and use more exibly than would be assumed; techniques of ensuring
rangeland use and access were hybrid, often in the making due to changing
political and economic environments. The history of shifting politics in the
Sino-Tibetan context, constant social reforms and unrest inuenced uctuating
ways of governing natural resources and rangelands. When political authority
over rangeland was insecure, access rights became an essential indication for
understanding the dynamics of resource use and the politics of power.
Hybridity has always existed but in varying degrees as a result of various
practices of assemblage, and this raises an important analytical point based
on historical evidence. Hybridity has been a persistent feature of rangeland
governance due to the way Chinese-Tibetan politics have played out; however,
this has changed over time as a result of shifting actors, politics, relationships
and pressures. Pastoralists have always negotiated forms of hybrid tenure ar-
rangements via interaction of institutions to remain exible and continue with
pastoral production. Throughout each era, regardless of whether it was labelled
as being the ‘feudal,’ ‘communal’ or ‘private,’ pastoralists deployed a variety of
strategies in response to changing political contexts and in relation to different
institutions (central state, whether imperial or communist; local community,
whether ‘chiefs’ or village leaders; and monasteries or religious leaders) – hy-
bridity emerged, but in different ways and through different routes.
The cases from pastoral Amdo indicate that the nature of hybridity var-
ies due to the fact that it must be constructed in particular historical contexts,
bound by political economic conditions between the feudal, collectivist or lib-
eralised eras. Thus, today’s hybridity, and so contemporary rangeland use and
management strategies, must be viewed in this historical context, as an ac-
cretion of practices and strategies that have emerged over different eras. This
paper, therefore, offers a new way of thinking about land governance in the
Tibetan Chinese context and suggests a more nuanced approach to rangeland
governance that goes beyond the conventional approach, with implication for
management, policy and politics of land in the Tibetan-Chinese context.
26 However, recent studies suggest a distinction between legal (de jure) tenure security and
actual (de facto) tenure security. Legal tenure security often derives from formal institutions
and actual tenure security (could be) derived from both formal and informal institutions (Ren
et al. 2019: 1400).
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Palden Tsering (Huadancairang)
90 Nomadic Peoples 27 No.1 (2023)
Acknowledgements
This work is supported by the PASTRES (Pastoralism, Uncertainty, Resilience:
Global Lessons from the Margins) programme, which has received Advanced
Grant funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European
Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (Grant agreement
No. 740342). PASTRES is co-hosted by the Institute of Development Studies
(IDS) and the European University Institute (EUI). For more information,
visit www.pastres.org
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Palden Tsering (Chinese Pinyin: Huadancairang) holds a Ph.D. from the
Institute of Development Studies (IDS) at the University of Sussex. He has
worked on the role of traditional Tibetan community, resource governance,
conservation and development, and politics of these dynamic interactions amid
changes and uncertainties in the pastoralist context. His recent research is on
hybrid rangeland governance in two pastoral settings in Amdo Tibet, China.
His research offers a new way of thinking about land governance and suggests
a more nuanced approach to rangeland governance that goes beyond the con-
ventional approach, with implications for management, policy and politics of
land in the Tibetan-Chinese context.
Email: p.huadancairang@ids.ac.uk
