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Retreat or resist: Navigating uncertainties in pastoral Amdo Tibet, China
Abstract
In the contemporary era marked by heightened uncertainties, particularly attributable to climate change, insufficient attention has been directed towards rural pastoral China. Paradoxically, it is within these rural settings, notably those reliant on natural resources, that the palpable repercussion of extreme climate variations unfold. Pastoralists in Saga, Amdo Tibet, acting as authorized stewards of the rangeland, find themselves grappling with formidable challenges emanating from escalating land values spurred by tourism, infrastructure investments, conservational initiatives, and the consequential impacts of climate change-induced land loss. This
study underscores the pivotal role of the local-state relations in navigating the mounting uncertainties and complexities arising from external interventions. Specifically, this paper examines how pastoralists engage in negotiating the norms, roles and relationships governing their integration or securing favourable terms within
evolving land issues. Drawing on empirical cases and with the notion of assemblage, it is evident that pastoralists adeptly leverage established roles and relationships, notably through the utilization of retired village cadres, using their seasoned understanding of bureaucratic intricacies, forms a critical network instrumental in preserving pastoralists’ access to essential rangeland resources on the ground.
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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.
This study presents a comprehensive overview of the evolving landscape of tourism and climate change research over the past decade by leveraging bibliometric analysis and a dataset sourced from the Scopus Database. The study scrutinised over 3400 English language articles. The analysis reveals a remarkable surge in publications, signifying the growing recognition of climate change’s multifaceted impact on tourism. However, a noteworthy geographical disparity emerges, with many regions remaining underrepresented in the literature, particularly in Africa and the Middle East. This oversight is concerning, given the vulnerability of these regions to climate change and their burgeoning tourism industries. The study also highlights the pivotal role of influential scholars, funding organisations, and publication outlets in shaping the research landscape. The European Commission and the National Natural Science Foundation of China are major funders. At the same time, journals like Sustainability and the Journal of Sustainable Tourism serve as prominent platforms for disseminating research findings. The analysis uncovers thematic trends, including the growing focus on climate change modelling and its implications for destination planning. However, research gaps persist, notably in sports tourism and climate resilience within the tourism sector. In conclusion, this study offers valuable insights into the current state of tourism and climate change research, pinpointing areas that demand increased attention and inclusivity. It is a valuable resource for scholars, policymakers, and stakeholders working towards a sustainable and resilient future for the global tourism industry in the face of climate change.
Smallholders and pastoralists are particularly vulnerable to the impacts of climate change due to their high reliance on socio-ecological systems for their livelihood. Building their resilience to these adverse effects of climate change is crucial for mitigating their vulnerabilities, especially in remote and fragile ecosystems. This study aims to assess the climate change livelihood resilience of smallholders and pastoralists in the Indian Himalayas. We build a livelihood resilience index, using the three dimensions of resilience, namely assimilative capacity, autopoiesis and cognitive ability, and weighed using entropy-TOPSIS approach The dimensions of resilience was estimated through indicators by a household survey of 289 randomly selected respondents across the three districts of Garhwal Himalayas. The results showed that the livelihood resilience of smallholders was greater than pastoralists. Among pastoralists, settlement brought positive changes to their livelihood, opening the gateway to access basic facilities. Key findings of the study indicate that public policy should focus towards information accessibility, encouraging environmental awareness and conservation, promoting social inclusion and cooperatives, and fostering grass root organization structures like forest-level organisation through informality to strengthen the resilience of communities to climate change.
Unprecedented climate extremes will likely become a new 'normal'. Urban political ecology is thus confronted with the challenge of exploring and theorising emerging geographies of unprecedented climate change. This raises questions on the extent and ways in which past socionatures can be mobilised for this task. It also urges a critical reflection on what forms of knowledge are needed to meet political ecology's normative aspirations of transforming emerging and future socionatures of climate change. I argue that a critique of past and present socionatures alone is not enough to meet these theoretical and normative goals. The main objective of this paper, therefore, is to lay the foundations of a future-oriented urban political ecology that approaches geographies of climate change more experimentally and speculatively. To this aim, I examine the explanatory potential of two (of many possible) experiments, collaboratively developed by a team of hydrologists, climatologists, and political ecologists. Both experiments depart from past and present logics of colonial violence, racial capitalism, and climate change, but explore competing notions of unprecedented futures. The first experiment consists of a critical-realist scenario approach that examines how power and variability in the exercise of agency might shape outcomes of future unprecedented climate extremes. The second involves a model that speculatively brings about a better world in response to climate extremes and lays the foundation of a political ecology of possibility. The paper thereby serves as a demonstration of how critique can be mobilised to explore and reimagine urban futures.
Primary productivity response to climatic drivers varies temporally, indicating state-dependent interactions between climate and productivity. Previous studies primarily employed equation-based approaches to clarify this relationship, ignoring the state-dependent nature of ecological dynamics. Here, using 40 y of climate and productivity data from 48 grassland sites across Mongolia, we applied an equation-free, nonlinear time-series analysis to reveal sensitivity patterns of productivity to climate change and variability and clarify underlying mechanisms. We showed that productivity responded positively to annual precipitation in mesic regions but negatively in arid regions, with the opposite pattern observed for annual mean temperature. Furthermore, productivity responded negatively to decreasing annual aridity that integrated precipitation and temperature across Mongolia. Productivity responded negatively to interannual variability in precipitation and aridity in mesic regions but positively in arid regions. Overall, interannual temperature variability enhanced productivity. These response patterns are largely unrecognized; however, two mechanisms are inferable. First, time-delayed climate effects modify annual productivity responses to annual climate conditions. Notably, our results suggest that the sensitivity of annual productivity to increasing annual precipitation and decreasing annual aridity can even be negative when the negative time-delayed effects of annual precipitation and aridity on productivity prevail across time. Second, the proportion of plant species resistant to water and temperature stresses at a site determines the sensitivity of productivity to climate variability. Thus, we highlight the importance of nonlinear, state-dependent sensitivity of productivity to climate change and variability, accurately forecasting potential biosphere feedback to the climate system.
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.
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.
Environmental conflicts manifest in different ways, with context-specific impacts on the affected regions. Emerging as a crucial point of national and international security, issues of climate change have taken the fore. In the Lake Chad Region, more people have become more susceptible to the climate change, given the poverty level, unemployment and inadequate governance in these regions. Christened as the world’s most complicated humanitarian disaster, the receding lake which has served as a major source of livelihood in time past is now a haven for violent conflict and extremist groups. Assuming top on the agenda of African Union (AU) Peace and Security Council and the UN Peacebuilding Commission meetings held in 2022, its importance cannot be underestimated. To this end, this paper strengthens the evidence on climate-related conflict in the Lake Chad Basin and its simultaneous effect on human security. Using qualitative method, data was gathered through secondary sources, such as journal articles, reports from the Lake Chad Basin Commission (LCBC), books and online sources on the subject matter. Data gathered were analyzed using content analysis. Findings reveals that the vulnerability of the area based on poverty, historical antecedents to conflict and crime, as well as the growing population makes the response to the receding lake naturally violent. It is recommended therefore, that the Lake should be revived and nourished by joint collaboration from states within the region and international actors as a long term plan. Also, resilient measures through employment opportunities and skilled training should be available for the youths and most vulnerable people.
Lakes are important guarantees of regional economic development and ecological security. Previous studies focused on trends of surface area and water level of lakes in Xinjiang, but paid less attention to nonlinear change and driving mechanisms of lake areas at annual and monthly scales. To address this issue, this study used a remote-sensing Big Data cloud platform and mathematical statistical methods to investigate the change in typical lakes and its attribution in Xinjiang during 1986–2020. The results showed that: 1) there was a significant linear trend in Xinjiang lakes: except for Jili Lake, the plains lakes showed an insignificant (p > 0.1) expansion trend, while the mountain lakes showed an significant expansion trend (p < 0.01). 2) There was a significant nonlinear trend in Xinjiang lakes: most of the plains lakes showed periodicity at 14 and 21 years, however most of the mountain lakes showed periodicity at 17 and 21 years. Most of the mutation trends of plains lakes were not significant, yet the mutation trends of mountain lakes showed significant expansion. 3) Human activities were the dominant factor leading to changes in the plains lakes: among the anthropogenic factors, farmland area, GDP, and population had significant effects on lake area (p < 0.1), and lake expansion was closely related to population and farmland area. Among climatic elements, precipitation mainly affected the changes in plains lakes. 4) Climate change was the dominant factor leading to changes in mountain lakes. The effects of temperature change on mountain lakes were all significantly positive (p < 0.05). In the future, it will be necessary to build lake protection schemes that adapt to climate change and human disturbances. This study can provide an important scientific basis for the rational development and utilization of lakes in Xinjiang.
Tourism value chains is scattered across the economic fields. This paper seeks to carry out an empirical analysis of the relationship between climate change and tourism development in China. We used relevant data from 31 provinces in China, and analyzed the spatial effects of climate change on tourism development using a spatial Durbin model. In the development of tourism in Chinese provinces, the research results show that the high-high agglomeration areas of inbound overnight tourists are widely distributed in the coastal areas of eastern China, while the low-low agglomeration areas are mainly distributed in western China, showing an unreasonable bipolar distribution. In terms of climate change, the increase of annual precipitation contributes to the enhancement of the number of inbound overnight tourists in local areas, but reduces the number of inbound overnight tourists in adjacent areas; the increase of annual average temperature raises the number of inbound overnight tourists in local areas, but decreases the number of inbound overnight tourists in adjacent areas; which indicates that there is a spatial spillover effect of climate change on tourism development. Therefore, we propose that western China should receive further policy support, the positive spatial spillover effect of the number of inbound overnight visitors among provinces should be fully utilized, and the tourist attractions should be enriched and developed. However, there are some limitations in the construction of the spatial weight matrix, the consideration of sample size, and the selection of factors affecting tourism development.
As the largest inland saltwater lake in China, Qinghai Lake plays an important role in regional sustainable development and ecological environment protection. In this study, we adopted a spatial downscaling model for mapping lake water at 10 m resolution through integrating Sentinel-2 and Landsat data, which was applied to map the water extent of Qinghai Lake from 1991 to 2020. This was further combined with the Hydroweb water level dataset to establish an area-level relationship to acquire the 30-year water level and water volume. Then, the driving factors of its water dynamics were analyzed based on the grey system theory. It was found that the lake area, water level, and water volume decreased from 1991 to 2004, but then showed an increasing trend afterwards. The lake area ranges from 4199.23 to 4494.99 km². The water level decreased with a speed of ~0.05 m/a before 2004 and then increased with a speed of 0.22 m/a thereafter. Correspondingly, the water volume declined by 5.29 km³ in the first 13 years, and rapidly increased by 15.57 km³ thereafter. The correlation between climatic factors and the water volume of Qinghai Lake is significant. Precipitation has the greatest positive impact on the water volume variation with the relational grade of 0.912, while evaporation has a negative impact.
With climate warming and intensification of human activities, the eco-environmental problems of lakes in middle and high latitudes become increasingly prominent. Qinghai Lake, located in the northeastern of the Tibetan Plateau, is the largest inland saltwater lake in China. Recently, the problem of Cladophora blooms has been widely concerning. In this study, the area of floating Cladophora blooms (hereafter FCBs) in Qinghai Lake from 1986 to 2021 was extracted using Floating Algal Index (FAI) method based on Landsat TM/ETM+/OLI and Sentinel-2 MSI images, and then the intra- and inter-annual variation characteristics and spatial patterns of FCBs were analyzed. The results show that the general change trend of FCBs in Qinghai Lake featured starting in May, expanding rapidly from June to August, and increasing steadily from September to October. From 1986 to 2021, the area of FCBs in Qinghai Lake showed an overall increasing trend in all months, with the largest increase in July at 0.1 km2/a, followed by October at 0.096 km2/a. Spatially speaking, the FCBs area showed a significant increasing trend in the northern Buha River estuary (BRN) and southern Buha River estuary (BRS) regions, a slight increase in the Shaliu River estuary (SR) region, and a decreasing trend in the Quanji River estuary (QR) region and the Heima River estuary (HR) region. The correlation between the meteorological factors and the changes in FCBs was weak, but the increase in flooded pastures in the BRN region (Bird Island) due to rising water levels was definitely responsible for the large-scale increase in FCBs in this region. However, the QB, northeastern bay of Shaliu River estuary (SRB) and HR regions, which also have extensive inundated grassland, did not have the same increase in FCBs area, suggesting that the growth of Cladophora is caused by multiple factors. The complex relationships need to be verified by further research. The current control measures have a certain inhibitory effect on the Cladophora bloom in Qinghai Lake because the FCBs area was significantly smaller in 2017–2020 (5.22 km2, 3.32 km2, 4.55 km2 and 2.49 km2), when salvage work was performed, than in 2016 and 2021 (8.67 km2 and 9.14 km2), when no salvage work was performed.
The Chinese Communist Party's (CCP) ideology, rooted in its foundational struggles, explicitly denounces “bureaucratism” ( guanliaozhuyi ) as an intrinsic ailment of bureaucracy. Yet while the revolutionary Party has blasted bureaucratism, its revolutionary regime has had to find a way to coexist with bureaucracy, which is a requisite for effective governance. An anti-bureaucratic ghost thus dwells in the machinery of China's bureaucratic state. We analyse the CCP's anti-bureaucratism through two steps. First, we perform a historical analysis of the Party's anti-bureaucratic ideology, teasing out its substance and emphasizing its roots in and departures from European Marxism and Leninism. Second, we trace both the continuity and evolution in the Party's anti-bureaucratic rhetoric, taking an interactive approach that combines close reading with computational analysis of the entire corpus of the People's Daily (1947–2020). We find striking endurance as well as subtle shifts in the substance of the CCP's anti-bureaucratic ideology. We show that bureaucratism is an umbrella term that expresses the revolutionary Party's anxiety about losing its popular legitimacy. Yet the substance of the Party's concern evolved from commandism and revisionism under Mao, to corruption and formalism during reform. The Party's ongoing critiques of bureaucratism and formalism unfold in parallel fashion with its efforts to standardize, regularize and institutionalize the state.
Alarming rates of environmental change have catalyzed scholars to call for fundamental transformations in social‐political and economic relations. Yet cautionary tales about how power and politics are constitutive of these efforts fill the literature. We show how a relational framing of adaptation and transformation demands a political, cross‐scalar, and socionatural analysis to probe the affects and effects of climate change and better grasp how transformative change unfolds. We bring affect theory into conversation with the literature on adaptation politics, socio‐environmental transformations, subjectivity, and our empirical work to frame our analysis around three under investigated aspects of transformation: (i) the uncertain and unpredictable relations that constitute socionatures; (ii) other ways of knowing; and (iii) the affective and emotional relations that form a basis for action. Affective adaptation represents a different ontological take on transformation by reframing the socionatural, normative and ethical aspects as relational, uncertain, and performative. This directs analytical attention to processes rather than outcomes. The emphasis on the encounter between bodies in affect theory points to the need for experiential and embodied ways of knowing climate to effect transformative change. Effective transformation requires recognizing uncertainty and unpredictability as part of transformative processes. This is not because all outcomes are acceptable, but rather because uncertainty and unpredictability are elements which help generate affects (action) and emotional commitment to shared human and more than human relations in action, projects, and policies.
This article is categorized under: Vulnerability and Adaptation to Climate Change > Values‐Based Approach to Vulnerability and Adaptation
Village cadres are important agents for the state yet disciplining them has been difficult. There are few disciplinary tools that can easily hold them to account. Prior to 2018, Party discipline did not apply to non-Party cadres. Legislation was ambiguous in relation to these grassroots agents and had to rely heavily on legal interpretation. The impact of the cadre evaluation system on village cadres, who are not considered to be public servants on the state payroll, was limited. This situation has changed since 2018. The party-state has consolidated and institutionalized ways in which grassroots cadres are checked and disciplined. Instead of relying on policy regulation, which had been the dominant disciplinary method since 1949, village cadres are now fully subject to Party rules and state laws. These changes have been accomplished through the application of three measures. First, village Party secretaries are to serve concurrently as village heads, and members of village and Party committees are to overlap, thereby making them subject to Party discipline. Second, village cadres are now considered to be “public agents” and are on an equal legal footing with other state agents. Finally, a campaign waged by the criminal justice apparatus cleaned up village administration and prepared it for upcoming village elections in a new era.
Land is a key input in economic production and production-waste sink. This links land to the causes of and responses to climate change. The dominant climate action ideas are based on the concept of 'land tenure security' which, in a global context marked by land-based inequities, means ratifying what already exists. This reinforces undemocratic social structures and institutions that themselves contribute to climate change. A restructuring of global land politics is called for, without which any analyses of and responses to climate change are at best superficial, and at worst, flawed and self-defeating. What is needed is to acknowledge the pervasive land-based social inequities in the world, and to end such inequities by pursuing a redistribution of a range of access to a range of land and resources in ways that categorically benefit the working people.
The Qinghai Lake Basin (QLB), located in the northeastern part of the Qinghai–Tibet Plateau, has a fragile ecological environment and is sensitive to global climate change. With the progress of societal and economic development, the tourism industry in the QLB has also developed rapidly, which is bound to result in great changes in landscape patterns. In this study, we first analyzed the change characteristics of landscape patterns in the QLB from 1990 to 2018, and we then used the Markov model and the future land use simulation (FLUS) model, combined with natural, social, and ecological factors, to predict the changes in the number and spatial distribution of landscape patterns in the period between 2026 and 2034. The results of the study show that desert areas have been greatly reduced and transformed into grasslands. The grassland area expanded from 49.22% in 1990 to 59.45% in 2018, corresponding to an increase of 10.23%. The direct cause of this result is the combined effects of natural and man-made factors, with the latter playing a leading role. As such, government decision-making is crucial. Lastly, we simulated the landscape patterns in the period from 2018 to 2034. The results show that in the next 16 years, the proportion of various landscapes will change little, and the spatial distribution will be stable. This research provides a reference for the formulation of ecological environment management and protection policies in the QLB.
This essay introduces and invites contributions to a new Journal of Peasant Studies Forum on ‘climate change and critical agrarian studies’. Climate change is inextricably entwined with contemporary capitalism, but how the relationship between capitalism and climate change plays out in the rural world requires deeper analysis. In particular, the way agrarian struggles connect with the huge challenge of climate change is a vital focus for both thinking and action. In this essay, we make the connections between climate change and critical agrarian studies and identify competing, although overlapping, narratives. These narratives frame climate change debates and the way that the dynamics of climate change shape and are shaped by the rural world, whether through state policies, international governance, corporate influence, or agrarian struggles. We use a simple framework to examine different logics and strategies for anti-capitalist struggles that might connect climate change and agrarian mobilisations. We conclude with some overall reflections and suggestions for broad, guiding questions for future inquiry as part of the JPS Forum.
The regional workshops within the mountain development programme of InWEnt [On 1 January 2011, InWEnt became part of Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) GmbH] aim at addressing pressing problems of mutual interest among the participating partners by focusing on a specific topic. In 2010, two conferences on pastoralism were held in the framework of the mountain development programme. Complementing the series that started with the Khorog and Kashgar workshops in July the Lhasa gathering happened to be the final part with a special focus on pastoralism and rangeland management on the Tibetan Plateau. It seems to have been the appropriate timing to emphasize upon a pressing issue that is generating increased and rejuvenated interest in the debates on biodiversity, climate and global change. Planners are challenged by designing concepts for nature protection and resource management in order to implement “green policies”. Decision-makers keep in mind the dual challenges between livelihood improvement and natural resource management by translating and transferring it into modernisation programmes. Far-reaching policies that aim at a reconciliation between ecological necessities and economic demands are tested and implemented in a grand design. Especially the Tibetan Plateau is an arena where the term eco-shelter has become a specific meaning that is affecting the reconciliation between nature and society as well as leading to far-reaching transformations in settlement structures and economic strategies. Recent interventions have changed and modified pastoral practices, terminated and extinguished certain traditions and opened-up new hitherto unknown and unexpected opportunities for pastoralists on the Tibetan Plateau. Lhasa provided the appropriate and sophisticated venue for a workshop highlighting recent developments in pastoralism and its linkages to agriculture and other economic sectors. On the vast Tibetan Plateau pastoralism and rangeland management are not only challenges for regional planning, both sectors offer a tremendous economic potential and are proof for the adaptive properties and resilience of pastoralists exposed to harsh environmental conditions and all kinds of changes. Lhasa is the centre for most institutions that are involved in evaluating, planning and implementing programmes and packages. The workshop profited from the local and neighbouring expertise. Academic institutions from pastoral and agro-based research were as well represented as delegates of implementing agencies in the wider field of poverty alleviation and rural development. The specificities of the Tibetan Plateau were discussed in relation to neighbouring regions that are part of InWEnt’s mountain development programme. Consequently, the gathering of scientists, decision-makers and representatives from implementing agencies fulfilled once again the goal to enable a fruitful exchange of ideas and to create a platform for mutual debate in a community of learning. The proceedings volume is assembling the keynotes and case studies that were presented in the plenary sessions. Some of the presented insights are meant to stimulate further debates on a significant intervention in the pastoral sector. With this proceedings volume we attempt to reach a wider readership that has an interest in the changes, challenges and transformations in pastoralism and rangeland management. Some of the key concepts, designs for modernisation and aims for the immediate future in the rural areas of the Tibetan Plateau are presented here in a concise and easily approachable manner by leading experts in the respective fields. The book informs a community of practice for whom in addition to the keynotes the results of group work and discussions are secured for future reference. The workshop participants have shared their recommendations. The editors are grateful to all contributors who have explained their views in a precise and sound manner. Special thanks go to the local organisers represented by the experienced staff of the Tibetan Academy of Agricultural and Animal Sciences (TAAAS) for a great show of hospitality, for all arrangements that have contributed to a successful regional workshop. The results are available in Chinese and in English language.
Hermann Kreutzmann, Yang Yong, Jürgen Richter
The construction of an ecological civilization is a strategic idea proposed based on the conditions of different countries and the laws governing social development. It is a new way to promote harmonious coexistence between humans and nature. Therefore, exploring the evolution characteristics and influence of ecological civilization in China is helpful for the country’s future development. This study uses the pentagon model, panel threshold regression model, and spatial analysis tool to explore the law of space-time differentiation and analyze regional coordination and ecological civilization construction in 31 provinces, cities, and autonomous regions in China from 2000 to 2018. During the study period, the construction of ecological civilization in China generally fluctuated; the spatial differentiation pattern of the eastern region was more developed than that of the central region, which was more developed than that of the western region. The regional coordination degree decreased in the order of east >central >northeast >west, and the degree of coordination in provinces and cities gradually shifted and finally accumulated to be reflected in the economy and environment in 2018. The most important factor affecting the development of ecological civilization was determined to be scientific research, followed by air quality and government information disclosure.
In this paper I conduct a comparative analysis of three Chinese experiments with participatory budgeting (PB), a democratic innovation that has circulated worldwide. Relying on a renewed typology of political representation and ethnographic fieldwork combined with official data collection in Chengdu, Sichuan and Wenling, Zhejiang over seven years, it investigates the expansion and practice of PB and analyzes the relationship between participation and representation. It asserts that in the Chinese context PB cannot be simply reduced to empowering civil society against established representatives or becoming an instrument of legitimization for established elites. In the three investigated cases—which are not representative of Chinese local politics—PB does contribute to opening the decision-making process to formerly excluded participants, who are nonetheless not exactly ordinary citizens but rather local elites and “super residents” bridging the gap between established elites and residents.
This article explores the concept of sustainability in a postsocialist context through an analysis of official discourses relating to sustainability in more than 700 articles published in the Chinese‐language newspaper People's Daily in 2015. The Chinese conception of sustainability, which emerges as a top‐down model built upon traditional ideologies and Chinese socialist legacies, inclusive of economic growth, environmental sustainability, social justice and quality of life. This Chinese official discourse of sustainability places less emphasis on individuals' rights and more on the state's interests, and is encompassed in the Chinese concept of the “ecological civilization.” This article argues that if we are to build a full picture of the internationalized idea of sustainability we need to adopt a more international approach to thinking about the issue, drawing upon the sustainability‐related discourses constructed from different national contexts using local languages and rhetoric.
The past few years have witnessed the revival of mediation as a chief method of labour dispute settlement in China. While the central government's campaign has reinvigorated the use of mediation in order to control social conflicts and maintain stability, its expansion and extensive deployment have also been driven by local authorities, as mediation can better serve their policy priorities and bureaucratic interests. Not only does the extension of mediation provide local bureaucratic agencies with flexibility and discretionary power to resolve conflicts without having to comply with legal minimums, it also legitimizes the courts' “non-legalistic approach” to settling dispute cases. The extensive employment of mediation by local authorities has chipped away at the role of legal procedures in settling labour disputes. The revival of mediation embodies a tension between the rule of law the government has promoted since the reform and the extrajudicial methods it needs for controlling conflicts.
The central argument developed in this essay is that today we are seeing a proliferation of normative orders where once state normativity ruled and the dominant logic was toward producing a unitary normative framing. One synthesizing image we might use to capture these dynamics is that of a movement from centripetal nation-state articulation to a centrifugal multiplication of specialized assemblages. This multiplication in turn can lead to a sort of simplification of normative structures insofar as these assemblages are partial and often highly specialized formations centered in particular utilities and purposes. The valence of these particular utilities and purposes can range from the search for justice (the ICC) to narrow self-interest (Lex constructionis). While this is still a minor process in the larger scale of our geopolity, it signals the beginning of a multi-sited, though partial, disruption of its existing formal architecture. This raises questions about the future of crucial frameworks through which modern societies, economies, and polities (under the rule of law) have operated: the social contract of liberal states, social democracy as we have come to understand it, modern citizenship, and the formal mechanisms that render certain claims legitimate and others illegitimate in liberal democracies. These frameworks have held together complex interdependencies between rights and obligations, power and the law, wealth and poverty, allegiance and exit.
With post-Mao China as a case study, this article aims to examine the political economy of asymmetric decentralization in relation to development at the national, regional (inter-local) and local levels. Economically, sub-national governments have been granted greater autonomy with huge decentralized fiscal and administrative powers and competencies. Politically, however, China is still a state under Communist Party domination. Local officials are not elected locally but are assigned by the party. This phenomenon of ‘economic decentralization to the local’ along with ‘political centralization under the party’ is described as ‘asymmetric decentralization’. The mechanism behind asymmetric decentralization is upward accountability—the greater the economic growth, the better chances there are for local leaders to receive political promotions, administrative power and many tangible and intangible perks. The article further discusses six Janus-faced consequences of asymmetric decentralization, which can be grouped into three pairs of administrative levels: (1) at the national level—positive for relative national economic stability but negative for uneven development across the country; (2) at the regional (inter-local) level—bad for inter-local fragmentation but good for cross-regional cadre transfer; and (3) at the local level—where local policy innovation is a strength but local unsustainable development is a weakness. These consequences, which look contradictory or incompatible on the surface, can be better understood through the analytic framework of ‘asymmetric decentralization with upward accountability’.
Abstract The term “access” is frequently used by property and natural resource analysts without adequate definition. In this paper we develop a concept of access and examine a broad set of factors that differentiate access from property. We define access as “the ability to derive benefits from things,” broadening from property's classical definition as “the right to benefit from things.” Access, following this definition, is more akin to “a bundle of powers” than to property's notion of a “bundle of rights.” This formulation includes a wider range of social relationships that constrain or enable benefits from resource use than property relations alone. Using this framing, we suggest a method of access analysis for identifying the constellations of means, relations, and processes that enable various actors to derive benefits from resources. Our intent is to enable scholars, planners, and policy makers to empirically “map” dynamic processes and relationships of access.
Tourism needs to reduce emissions in line with other economic sectors, if the international community's objective of staying global warming at 1.5°-2.0 °C is to be achieved. This will require the industry to half emissions to 2030, and to reach net-zero by mid-century. Mitigation requires consideration of four dimensions, the Scales, Scopes, Stakeholders and Strategies of carbon management. The paper provides a systematic review of these dimensions and their interrelationships, with a focus on emission inventory comprehensiveness; allocation principles at different scales; clearly defined responsibilities for decarbonization; and the identification of significant mitigation strategies. The paper concludes that without mitigation efforts, tourism will deplete 40% of the world's remaining carbon budget to 1.5 °C. Yet, the most powerful decarbonization measures face major corporate, political and technical barriers. Without worldwide policy efforts at the national scale to manage the sector's emissions, tourism will turn into one of the major drivers of climate change.
This article examines the implementation of China’s ongoing program for rangeland protection through the case of Nagchu in the Tibet Autonomous Region. The program's three goals are preventing rangeland degradation, changing ‘the mode of pastoral development’, and increasing pastoralists' income. Based on the belief that overgrazing has caused pervasive rangeland degradation, it compensates pastoralists for losses incurred where grazing is banned and rewards them for maintaining livestock numbers within determined rangeland carrying capacity. In practice, in China’s upwardly accountable system, local officials focus first and foremost on funding-oriented task fulfillment rather than rangeland protection. Consequently, the program ends up having little to do with rangeland protection, serving instead as a monetary-payment and de-stocking program advancing China’s overriding goal of transforming traditional pastoralism.
In the reform era, the Chinese state often resorts to managed campaigns to implement important policies. This article examines how managed campaign influences the mode of bureaucratic operation in China. Avoiding a simplistic dichotomy between campaign mobilization and bureaucratic institutionalization, this study unpacks the Weberian bureaucratic concept and shows that some core dimensions of the model are compatible with managed campaign. While the pressure of mobilization tend to compromise functional differentiation and strict adherence to stable rules, they can reinforce other dimensions such as top-down control in a multilevel hierarchy and procedural integrity. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has configured the bureaucracy to serve its organizational and political needs, resulting in a mode of operation that partially conforms to the Western standard of public administration.
This paper builds on the literature on green grabbing. It makes a fresh contribution by bringing in aspects of green grabbing that are less visible and obvious. These are subtle, fluid and indirect interconnections between climate change politics and land grabs. It is difficult to see these interconnections from an ‘either black or white’ perspective. It is likely that the extent of this ‘grey area’ intersection in terms of affected social relations, nature and land use change is quite significant globally, even when such interconnections tend to operate below the radar of dominant governance institutions and database tracking. This situation calls for more nuanced understanding of governance imperatives, and for constructing the necessary body of knowledge needed for appropriate political intervention. This paper offers preliminary ways in which such interconnections can be seen and understood, and their implications for research and politics explored. It concludes by way of a preliminary discussion of the notion of ‘agrarian climate justice’ as a possible framework for formal governance or political activism relevant to tackling such grey area interconnections.
Global climate change is causing the majority of large lakes on the Tibetan Plateau to expand. While these rising lake levels and their causes have been investigated by hydrologists and glaciologists, their impacts on local pastoral communities have mostly been ignored. Our interviews with pastoralists in central Tibet reveal their observations and beliefs about Lake Serling's expansion, as well as how its effects are interacting with current rangeland management policies. Interviewees reported that the most negative effects on their livelihoods have been reduced livestock populations and productivity due to the inundation of high-quality pastures by saline lake water. However, pastoralists' collective efforts based on traditional values and norms of sharing, assistance, and reciprocity have helped them cope with these climate change impacts. These local, traditional coping strategies are particularly worthy of attention now, given that the transformation of traditional pastoralism is a goal of current government development initiatives.
Against the suggestion that we are living in ‘post-political’ times, I argue that the capacity for critical politics is permanent and broadly distributed, as it emerges from the contradictions embedded in our everyday lives. Yet collective mobilisation to change prevailing power formations is not common. Ethnographers are well positioned to explain why this is so, by investigating critique at its incipient stage, when it may be mute or incoherent, and examining how it develops into a world-changing force or—more often—how the emergence of such a force is interrupted. Posing the trajectory towards historically effective politics as counter-factual (something we might expect to find), and attending to how such a trajectory is interrupted, offers a useful point of entry for ethnographic research. Drawing on the work of Antonio Gramsci and Stuart Hall, I propose a set of questions that could help guide a renewed anthropology of politics along these lines: (1) What is the formation of power that creates a sense of unease, or separation? (2) Through what practices is critique shared or enunciated? (3) What is the social group that connects to this critique? (4) In what ways does a group thus assembled act to change the configuration of power it has identified as problematic? Following the logic of the counterfactual: (5) What potential or embryonic critiques are not articulated, (6) do not form the basis for connection and mobilisation, or (7) do not make new worlds? Finally: (8) What are the formations, practices, and affective states that sustain and stabilise the status quo? In the second part of my essay I use these questions to probe practices of politics in three sites in rural Indonesia where I have carried out research.
This paper analyzes the transmission of China’s Ecological Migration Policy from the central government down to Tibetan villages and townships for implementation. It examines the specific ways through which the policy is translated from Chinese to Tibetan and communicated through various local dialects to concerned pastoralists. In order to achieve the Ecological Migration Policy’s purported objectives of environmental conservation, livelihood improvement, and urbanization, township government officials at the grassroots level mistranslate and miscommunicate policy meanings to villagers to render an otherwise unfeasible, impractical policy implementable on the ground. Tibetan pastoralists actively engage with this resettlement project to fulfill their desires and aspirations for accessing healthcare and educational services in urban areas. However, this pursuit of legibility is induced by the state’s negligence of rural pastoralist life and elimination of alternative educational facilities in rural communities. Both negligence and elimination of educational facilities in rural areas concentrate and increase investments in education and healthcare in urban settlements. These conjunctures ultimately drive Tibetan pastoralists to “choose” their only available option, to resettle in urban townships.
Qinghai Lake, as the largest saline inland lake in China, plays an important role in the surrounding semi-arid ecosystem. In recent years, the lake water level has increased rapidly; however, the driving factors causing water body changes are not fully understood. This study aims to investigate the hydrological processes in Qinghai Lake from 1959 to 2016, and to discuss their possible linkages to climatic change and human activity. The results indicate that both the water level and lake area gradually declined to their minima in 2004, before increasing rapidly. Annual evaporation and total runoff vary widely, but have shown an overall shift from decreasing to increasing trends. The annual average temperature has followed an increasing trend, and annual precipitation has increased rapidly since 2004. Hydrological changes (water level and lake) are positively correlated with runoff inflow into the lake and negatively correlated with evaporation from the lake surface. The water body expansion in recent years can be attributed to the decreasing difference between precipitation/river runoff and evaporation. The total water consumption by human activities has had a limited contribution to the water body changes. We conclude that hydrological changes have depended more on climatic variations than on human activities.
Lake Qinghai, the biggest inland lake and biggest saltwater lake in China, lies in the north-eastern part of the Qinghai Tibet Plateau. The lake is also an important vapour source for the special region. The dynamic variation of its water surface is a response of climate and environment around. In this study the long-time variation of Lake Qinghai was explored from time and space perspectives, based on the shoreline information which was extracted manually with moderate-high spatial resolution remote sensing imagery. The results showed that, as a whole the Lake Qinghai's area decreased from 1974 to 2004 and then increased till 2016. In 2004 the area was smallest, 4223.73 km², smaller by 253.80 km² than that in 1974. From 1974 to 1987 the water surface shrank sharply. While the variation range was relatively modest with mean value of 6.85 km² during the period from 2000 to 2009. During the last 7 years, the water surface increased by 128.27 km². In 2012, there was a sharp expansion with 65.12 km² larger than previous year; moreover the annual variation reached maximum, 59.18 km². The shoreline of Sand island, which lies in the east coast, varied significantly during the past few decades. From 1974 to 2004 the maximum back distance from the coastline was 4.59 km, and the value of annual variation was 0.39 km in 2012. The increase of precipitation in Lake Qinghai region, and the enlarging inflow runoff, which benefited directly from local ecological environment control measures implemented by government, are two important reasons to make the lake expanding in the last two decades.
This chapter describes the definitions of resilience, vulnerability, and human-natural systems, presents general views on vulnerability/resilience of pastoralism, provides the framework for assessing vulnerability/resilience of pastoralism, and identifies vulnerability/resilience of human-natural systems of pastoralism worldwide. Resilience is defined as the capacity of a system, community, or organization to withstand loss or damage and to recover from the impact of an emergency or disaster. Vulnerability is defined as the sensitivity of people, places, ecosystems, and species to contingencies and stress, and their capability to cope with them. A human-natural systems is defined as the integrated system in which people interact with natural components. Human–environment systems, social–ecological systems, ecological–economic systems, and population–environment systems are different forms of human-natural systems. The resilience/vulnerability of the human-natural systems concerns the resilience/vulnerability of interdependent systems of people and nature. The human-natral systems of pastoralism worldwide are reducing their resilience and enhancing their vulnerability to natural stress and human-induced shocks. An agroecosystem–livelihood–institution three-dimensional “vulnerability/resilience” framework and a pressure–state–response model can be used to examine the vulnerability/resilience of pastoralism worldwide. Ten case studies from seven major pastoral regions across six continents show that the vulnerability of pastoralism is very different across the world. Climate change and climate variability have driven fragile pastoral agroecosystems into more vulnerable conditions in the Great Plains of North America. Socioeconomic drivers such as land tenure change, agriculture policy reform, and human and livestock population growth have disrupted the pastoral institutions at local and national levels into marginalized ones in Central Asia, the South American Andes, the European Alps and highlands, Queensland in Australia, and the Arctic. Combined natural and human factors have driven pastoral agroecosystems and institutions into more vulnerable situations in the African Sahel and the Asian highlands. Social–ecological learning, technical and management innovations, social–ecological system renewal, and reorganization of institutions are pathways to mitigate the negative causes and effects of the pastoralism’s vulnerability.
This paper observes the effects state-sponsored resettlement in two Tibetan nomad counties of Yushu Prefecture, Qinghai Province (PRC). As nomads increasingly move to urban areas, regional and local economies are shifting, as are social relations and the traditional systems that have managed rangeland resources for millennia. Yet few studies have investigated the empirics of life within these resettled communities. This research takes a snapshot of key socio-economic indicators for resettled Tibetans as they transition to urban life and evaluates if and how nomads are benefiting, and what new challenges have arisen as a result of these processes. Drawing from survey and interview data, I suggest that while resettlement offers nomad families opportunities in terms of access to public services such as education and health care, it also entails significant new expenses for households even as their earnings potential contracts; these trends are exacerbated in the case of poorer households and income inequalities are likely to worsen when families move to urban areas. Likewise, while resettlement has resulted in increased purchase of consumption goods, household investment in productive assets has seen a corresponding decline. Even though access to some public services may increase with resettlement, quality of life in urban areas may suffer with respect to pollution exposure, lack of water and sanitation infrastructure, and increasing prices for basic commodities. With higher rates of school enrollment and the deskilling of the rural labour force, resettlement to urban areas is likely to undermine the long-term economic viability of pastoral production in Tibetan areas of China. Resettlement is also affecting the continuity of social institutions and modes of knowledge transmission, encouraging certain opportunities and closing off other potentialities for nomadic culture. This paper contributes to the literature on development-induced displacement, governance at China's margins, and the adaptability of pastoral production systems amidst state efforts to modernise and assimilate nomads. Leveraging this case study, we can theorise more broadly about the social, ecological, and economic repercussions of resettlement.
The so-called global land rush has drawn new attention to land, its uses and value. But land is a strange object. Although it is often treated as a thing and sometimes as a commodity, it is not like a mat: you cannot roll it up and take it away. To turn it to productive use requires regimes of exclusion that distinguish legitimate from illegitimate uses and users, and the inscribing of boundaries through devices such as fences, title deeds, laws, zones, regulations, landmarks and story-lines. Its very ‘resourceness’ is not an intrinsic or natural quality. It is an assemblage of materialities, relations, technologies and discourses that have to be pulled together and made to align. To render it investible, more work is needed. This Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers Plenary Lecture uses an analytic of assemblage to examine the practices that make up land as a resource. It focuses especially on the ‘statistical picturing’ devices and other graphic forms that make large-scale investments in land thinkable, and the practices through which relevant actors (experts, investors, villagers, governments) are enrolled. It also considers some of the risks that follow when these large-scale investments land in particular places, as land they must.
Ten case studies from seven major pastoral regions across six continents were studied in this paper by conceptualizing three factors (agro-ecosystem resilience, livelihood options, and institution capacity) as the axes of a three-dimensional vulnerability framework. This analysis
highlights the vulnerability of agriculture-based livelihood systems to
global changes and helps identify what institutions have the potential to
mobilize effective relief in different pastoral regions. In terms of
results, this vulnerability assessment shows that the vulnerability of
pastoralism was very different in all the cases across the globe. As such,
a further analysis, based on the pressure-state-response (PSR) model was
undertaken to enhance our understanding of the ways that global changes put pressures on pastoral livelihoods worldwide. From this we conclude that
climate change and climate variability are driving fragile pastoral
ecosystems into more vulnerable conditions. Socioeconomic factors, such as
changes in land tenure, agriculture, sedentarization, and institutions are
fracturing large-scale pastoral ecosystems into spatially isolated systems.
The implications of this analysis are that professionals, practitioners, and
policy makers should jointly develop a coupled human and natural systems
approach that focuses on enhancing the resilience of pastoral communities
and their practices. This requires institutional developments to support
asset building and good governance to enhance adaptive capability. In
addition, pastoralists' adaptation strategies to global change need to be
supported by public awareness and improved by institutional decisions at
different scales and dimensions.
Governmental interventions that set out to improve the world are assembled from diverse elements - discourses, institutions, forms of expertise and social groups whose deficiencies need to be corrected, among others. In this article I advance an analytic that focuses on practices of assemblage - the on-going labour of bringing disparate elements together and forging connections between them. I identify six practices that are generic to any assemblage, whatever its specific contours: 1) forging alignments, 2) rendering technical, 3) authorizing knowledge, 4) managing failures, 5) anti-politics, and 6) reassembling. I demonstrate the power of this analytic through an extended study of community forest management. This is an assemblage that brings together an array of agents (villagers, labourers, entrepreneurs, officials, activists, aid donors, scientists) and objectives (profit, pay, livelihoods, control, property, efficiency, sustainability, conservation). Its very unwieldiness helps to sharpen analysis of how such an assemblage is, in fact, assembled, and how it has been sustained for more than thirty years, absorbing hundreds of millions of dollars in programmes from the west coast of Canada to the eastern islands of Indonesia. I do not attempt to adjudicate the rights and wrongs of this assemblage. Rather, I deploy an analytic of assemblage to explore the practices that fill the gap between the will to govern and the refractory processes that make government so difficult.
In addressing claims that the art of guanxi is declining in China's current incorporation of capitalism, this article argues that guanxi must be treated historically as a repertoire of cultural patterns and resources which are continuously transformed in their adaptation to, as well as shaping of, new social institutions and structures, and by the particular Chinese experience with globalization. The article takes issue with approaches which treat guanxi as a fixed essentialized phenomenon which can only wither away with the onslaught of new legal and commercial regimes. Rather, as the examples of Taiwan and post-socialist Russia's encounter with capitalism suggest, guanxi practice may decline in some social domains, but find new areas to flourish, such as business transactions, and display new social forms and expressions. This historical approach to guanxi, which is sensitive to issues of power both within the Chinese social order and between China and the West, is especially critical of the unreflective positivist methodology and the teleology of modernization theory/narrative and neo-liberal discourse embedded in the argument for the decline of guanxi.
Involuntary population displacements and resettlement entailed by development programs have reached a magnitude and frequency that give these phenomena worldwide relevance and require policy-guided solutions. The author extracts the general trends and common characteristics revealed by a vast body of empirical data, to construct a theoretical model of displacement and reconstruction. The model captures the socioeconomic content of both segments of the process: forced displacement and reestablishment. It identifies the key risks and impoverishment processes in displacement as: (a) landlessness; (b) joblessness; (c) homelessness; (d) marginalization: (e) food insecurity; (f) loss of access to common property resources; (g) increased morbidity; (h) community disarticulation. Conversely, the model suggests that reconstructing and improving the livelihood of those displaced require risk-reversals through explicit strategies backed up by adequate financing. Flawed approaches to reconstruction and the intrinsic limitations of cost-benefit analysis are discussed. The paper shows how the proposed model can be used by practitioners and researchers as a diagnostic tool, a predictive tool, a problem-resolution tool and a research-guidance tool.
Mao’s invisible hand: the political foundations of adaptive governance in China, Harvard contemporary China series
- S Heilmann
- E J Perry
The Average Water Level of Qinghai Lake Reached the Maximum Since
- S Sjy
Evolution of lakeshore shape of Qinghai Lake and its cause
- Li