By Hong Jiang, assistant professor at University of Wisconsin

Introduction

Since the 1980s, widespread transitions have occurred in socialist countries such as China. Marxist ideologies have been weakened, active engagements with the market have occurred, and decentralization of governance has taken place (Lavigne 1999; McMillan and Naughton 1996; Turner 1999). While post-socialist transitions have a distinct historical and social background, many of the changes are global in nature. Decentralization is one example. In developed countries, decentralization has expanded in the provision of public services (Bennett 1990), and the community-based environmental movement has been championed as a grand vision (Weber 2000). In developing countries, especially in Africa and Latin America, decentralization has been promoted by the World Bank and other international organizations as a prerequisite for sustainable use and conservation (World Bank 1997). The perceived success of decentralization in post-socialist countries has encouraged the view that decentralization is part of good governance, and that it should be extended to conservation and resource management. 

China’s decentralization is unique in several aspects. First, instead of community-level management, which has been a common form of decentralization globally, China has drastically devolved decision-making powers to resource users (Unger 2002). Since the 1980s, most agricultural and much pasture land has been distributed to households. Second, various levels of the government have played crucial roles in the decentralization process. Decentralization was an important part of the national policy shift from revolutionary politics to economic growth, and regional and local governments continue to influence land use in important ways. This stands in sharp contrast to much of Africa and Latin America, where state involvement is weak and it is mainly international agencies, donors, and NGOs that have provided the engine for decentralized resource use (Shroeder 1999; Sundberg 1999). Third, China’s decentralization has come with an economic reform policy that aimed to reverse the economic failure of the former collective management (Jia and Lin 1994; Lin 1999). This increasing drive for development and growing reliance on the market have resulted in environmental issues being viewed through economic lenses (Jiang 1999). The unique Chinese experience provides an important socio-political context in which to explore decentralized pastureland use in this paper.

The complicated results of decentralization have been widely acknowledged (Luts and Caldecott 1996; Ribot 1999). While some champion decentralization’s positive effects on environmental sustainability (e.g., Bakir 2001; de Oliveria 2002), many studies reveal the unfulfilled promises of decentralization. Sundberg and Gray (this volume) suggest that community-level resource use can often exacerbate existing inequalities within the community, and as such, there is no guarantee for equitable use; Lane (2003) warns of the manipulation of decentralized resource management by local power holders; Nemarundwe (2004) argues that overlapping authority at the community level can serve to frustrate, rather than clarify, resource use; and Williams and Wells (1996) and Zhang (2000) report cases of reduced funding and concern for conservation as the power is decentralized and responsibility for environmental initiatives is placed on regional and local governments. While political, administrative, and financial difficulties can impact decentralized resource use, ecological dynamics add another level of complexity (Leach, Mearns, and Scoones 1999). As Assetto et al. (2003) indicate, decentralization is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for environmental protection and equitable resource use.

This paper joins in the study of decentralized resource use by analyzing the impact of household-based pastureland management in Uxin Ju, a community in western Inner Mongolia, China. After pastureland is distributed and fenced, sandy land reclamation becomes a growing concern as degradation rises. While household-based pastureland use and reclamation have brought about economic growth to the area, I argue that their effects are not uniformly positive when cultural change and ecological processes are taken into consideration. Instead of environmental conservation within designated protected areas, I discuss pastureland use that is an integral part of rural livelihood. Issues to be explored here are relevant to the second wave of conservation that emphasizes conservation with sustainable use (Brandon, Redford, and Sanderson 1998). While much of this paper will discuss more aggressive approaches to resource use that prioritize economy over ecology, toward the end I will discuss a renewed need for stricter conservation precisely because of this aggressive use.

This chapter proceeds as follows. In the first section, I will introduce how decentralization is implemented in Inner Mongolia, and its forms on the landscape in Uxin Ju, particularly the building of fences. Section two examines ways in which sandy land is reclaimed inside fences. The third section examines the impact of fencing on the Mongolian lifestyle, asserting the far-reaching cultural implications of resource privatization. While in general, fences have led the Mongols away from traditional nomadism, ecological processes of pastureland management have resulted in uneven landscape changes and concomitant inequality among the Mongols. The next two sections explore such landscape and socio-economic differentiation, and discuss the need for a less-aggressive approach to pastureland conservation. This paper concludes with a critique of household-level resource management from the perspectives of ecological processes, cultural change, and management scales.

Household-based pastureland management

Uxin Ju is a Mongolian township situated in Uxin banner, Ih Ju league in Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, China. It has four administrative villages (or gacha in Mongolian): Uxin Ju, Bayintaolegai, Chahanmiao, and Buridu (see Figure 1). Its population is dominated by Mongols, and its economy is based on sheep and cattle husbandry. Much of its 1,744 km² (or 2.6 million mu) is dominated by sandy land (83 percent), and land forms include upland (usually sandy), lowland, and sand dunes in between. The sandy upland and dune areas, if vegetated, are covered by Artemisia ordosica and Caragana spp. In between the moving sand dunes are small depressions where water conditions are favorable, and willow shrubs (Salix psammophila) can take root. The lowland, which has the most favorable water conditions, is dominated by grassy species Carex duriuscula and Achnatherum splendens and provides the best quality pastures in Uxin Ju.

China’s economic reform has brought about profound change to the landscape of Uxin Ju. Faced with the failure of the collective economy, the Chinese central government launched an economic reform policy in the late 1970s after the death of Mao. The reform started in the farming areas, where, under a Household Responsibility System (HRS), cropland and other production materials, previously managed by the communes, were distributed to the households. The HRS was soon spread to the pastoral areas, and the Inner Mongolia regional government took the lead in devising and implementing a two-tier HRS: both livestock and pastureland would be distributed to households. While the livestock was sold to households as private property, the state retained ownership of land, the use-rights to which were contracted to the households. The distribution of pastureland has been subject to periodic adjustment based on household democratic change. In Uxin Ju and many areas of Inner Mongolia, pastureland distribution was twice adjusted, in 1991 and 1997; the last adjustment also extended the contract terms to 30 to 50 years from an unspecified period (Jiang n.d.).

The household contract has the de facto effect of privatization, albeit a limited one, since land cannot be bought or sold but only have its use-rights transferred. Williams (2001) traces the shift to household-based management to the global distrust of common resource institutions and the common belief that privatization will promote ecological protection. Decentralization was widely acclaimed by the Chinese government as a cure for the economic and environmental problems of the collective management in the Mao era. The local area newspaper in Uxin Ju, The Ordos Daily (Feb. 2, 1989), celebrated the pastureland distribution with an article entitled “Now the Pasture Has Masters,” which asserted that this decentralization is the best way to care for the land and to develop the economy. Consequences of privatization will be discussed in greater detail later, but, in brief, the acclaimed promise of household-based pastureland use has been undermined by ecological, cultural, and economic problems.

Not all of China’s pastoral areas have implemented the two-tier HRS. Some have kept the pastureland as a common resource (Banks 2001), or demarcated household pastures only on paper (Thwaites et al. 1998), or fenced the pastureland only partially (Williams 2001). But in Uxin Ju, pastureland was fenced soon after its distribution to households in 1984-1985. Such a wide variation in pastureland decentralization is attributed to differing priorities of regional and local governments, which are responsible for the actual implementation of many of the reform policies (Jiang n.d.). In Inner Mongolia, while the regional government issued policies regarding HRS, methods of implementation became more detailed at the lower levels of government. The actual pastureland distribution was carried out by village (gacha) committees, which stipulated distribution rules. In the communities that I have investigated around Uxin Ju, two types of distribution rules were employed: one, based on strict equality of all people, was to distribute pastureland according to the number of persons in a household; the second was to take into consideration both the number of persons and livestock in a household. Uxin Ju followed the first rule. To minimize travel distance, distribution plans attempted to assign pastureland to the nearest households (instead of giving each household a piece of each type of land as in farming areas; see Kung and Liu 1997). To account for variations in species, coverage, and productivity, all pastureland was assessed according to usable biomass and converted to “standard pasture,” each mu corresponding to 100 kg of dry forage. The built-in structural equality in pastureland distribution comes from the Mao era’s ethos (Kung and Liu 1997); such equality, although subject to cadre manipulations, helps minimize the struggle for access that is common in the decentralized resource use in Africa (Gray, this volume) and Latin America (Sundberg, this volume). In Uxin Ju, however, initial conditions of equality have been undermined by socio-economic stratifications resulting from uneven landscape change, as will be discussed later.

Barbed wire fences quickly followed pasture distribution, creating enclosures called kulum by the Mongols. From the experience of eastern Inner Mongolia (Thwaites et al. 1998), it is clear that unless boundaries are demarcated with fences, pastureland distribution cannot be adhered to, since livestock will roam into unfenced pastures. In Uxin Ju, the people’s ready acceptance of the concept of fences came from the early socialist period when they built large enclosures in order to protect planted trees and crops, as well as to conserve pasture for the cutting of hay. In the 1980s, after the pastureland distribution, the practical need for fences quickly became clear since households had to protect their allotted pastures from turning into commons. The government encouraged fencing by providing subsidies. Data from Ih Ju League show that from 1978 to 1996, government funds accounted for 23.3 percent of total investment in pasture enclosure (Liu and Wang 1998). The rest of the funds came from individual households. In a 1998 interview, Bayingsonbuer, a Mongol living in Bayintaolegai gacha, said that since 1985, his household had spent over 20,000 Yuan (approximately US $2,400) on fences. This is a hefty sum given that the 1998 per capita income was only 1,952 Yuan (US $235). By the late 1990s, all contracted pasturelands in Uxin Ju, including those assigned to the poor, had been fenced.

Sandy land reclamation

With fences came more aggressive use of the pastureland as well as increased emphasis on sandy land improvement. Since the implementation of economic reform, China has paid more attention to rural environmental issues, and has attempted to use ecological science to guide environmental management. The term “ecological construction” came into wide use in the 1990s, advocating the repair of land degradation using ecological principles (Jiang n.d.). In reality, however, the implementation of ecological programs by all levels of the government has focused on aggressive approaches that undermine ecological processes. In Uxin Ju, for example, instead of protecting or recovering the original species, improvement efforts only considered biomass. Trees, which were nonexistent on the natural landscape, have been planted, along with exotic shrub and grass species.  Even the expansion of irrigated cropland has been seen as sign of ecological improvement. Concern for sustainability has been tilted toward the economy, while ecology has largely been seen as providing a necessary service.

Sandy land reclamation entails the conversion of degraded sandy pastureland and moving sand into usable pastures, and it is achieved through two kinds of efforts: transplanting and seeding, both followed by a prohibition of grazing in enclosures, at least in the summer, and sometimes year-round, for three years. The timing and length of these grazing bans have been determined and monitored by the local government, and violators are fined. Transplanting uses seedlings of trees and shrubs, and is practiced in enclosures closer to houses. In recent years, the total transplanted area per year has reached 30,000 mu or more. The most commonly transplanted tree species is the willow (Salix matsudana), and shrubs include local species such as Salix psammophila, Artemisia ordosica, and Caragana spp., and non-local species such as Hedysarum mongolicum and H. scoparium.  Methods of sand dune reclamation, which have been developed locally since the 1960s, are described as “blocking the front and hauling the back; boots first, then gowns and lastly hats.” That is, trees and shrubs are planted first on the lower part of leeward (front) and windward (back) sides. As the vegetation develops at the bottom of the sand dune like “boots,” the movement of sand is constrained, and the sand dunes are lowered. Planting slowly moves up to the sand dunes and dresses them in green “gowns” and finally covers them with “hats.” This method has worked well in some locations and has converted sandy land into usable pastures. It meets great difficulty, however, at the landscape scale, as will be discussed later.

Seeding is done with the help of airplanes that are operated by the local government. In 2001, Uxin Ju seeded 122,000 mu of sandy land. Airplane sowing is a labor-saving method of land improvement used mostly in large continuous areas of sandy, semi-vegetated, and low-lying land. In addition to shrubs, grasses such as Melilotus albus and Medicago sativa are also seeded. Since the area to be sown has to be large enough to justify the operation cost, airplane seeding goes beyond the boundaries of fences and requires coordination among multiple households. Since decentralization, this is one of the ways in which collective management maintains great importance. Funds for seeding are allocated from the government to the village. Once an area is chosen for operation by the technical staff in Uxin Ju, the households involved are expected to participate. If no rain follows seeding in ten to fifteen days, the operation will most likely fail. In most cases, even if seeds germinate, success is only partial because subsequent droughts may cause the young seedlings to die. The government reports that the average success rate for airplane seeding is 80 percent, but my interviews suggest that the actual seedling survival rate averages 50 percent or lower. In the recent drought from 1999 to 2001, most seeds failed to germinate. Regardless of seeding success, the participating households are obligated to follow the grazing ban for a three-year period after seeding. From the fourth year on, they can graze only in the cold season. Most households prefer to have their pasture seeded because of potential near-future gain, so there have not been major conflicts between the participating households and the government. However, there are cases when households are poor and have difficulty paying their share of the seeding cost. After their pasture is seeded and closed, most of these households have to rent pastureland from other households at 0.25 Yuan per sheep per day; this only increases the financial burden on poor households.

Reclamation is a joint venture between the government and individual households. Although land-use decisions are made by the households, the government still plays a crucial role in guiding land use through managerial and financial means. All government leaders are allocated responsibility to help a certain number of households in the reclamation process. Each year, Uxin Ju has spring and fall planting sprees during which all leaders go to their selected households to participate in planting. Each gacha also designates several large areas for concentrated efforts, and households that contracted the pasture of these areas are expected to plant trees there during the planting seasons. Government funding for planting and seeding is available through specific programs such as the North China Revegetation and Return Cultivation to Trees programs from the national government and the Family Pasture program from the regional government. Specific programs change over time, but overall, most of the seedlings and seeds are purchased with government funds, and labor input comes from households. In airplane seeding, the banner government paid 100 percent of the operational cost and seeds before 1995; now, it pays only slightly more than half, while requiring that households pay 2.5 Yuan per mu.

Most households actively participate in sandy land reclamation in order to augment household pastures. A sample of the household surveys that I conducted in 2001 shows that 48 percent of the sandy land had been transplanted or seeded by the households, although not all efforts were successful. In addition, the number of trees (willow and poplar) has increased drastically. Official statistics [author: what year?] show that the number of trees totaled 80,000, with each household averaging ninety trees. By 2001, my sampled households each owned, on average, 2,800 trees. These trees, along with irrigated cropland and some planted shrubs, are located in what is called “cultivation enclosures.” Although not used for grazing, this type of enclosure is the most productive and also the newest modification to the landscape that makes the pastoral area most farm-like.

Other than the regularly contracted pastureland, there are also “wastelands” that were not initially distributed in 1984.  These are moving sand areas or sand dunes, called “sandy waste.” Instead of allowing these lands to lay “waste,” the local government contracted them out to households on a voluntary basis and encouraged households to reclaim them. According to the local policy, any wasteland reclaimed will be awarded to the households that improved upon it as additional tax-free pasture in addition to their original allocation. Since all usable pastureland had been distributed, the only way to increase pastureland was to reclaim these wastelands. By 1991, most wastelands had been contracted. In most cases, large areas of sandy wasteland were contracted by multiple households. Some wastelands in remote locations were rented to outside groups (such as the First Chemical Engineering Plant of Ih Ju league). My interviews suggest that some households have already improved upon these wastelands with fences and planting; others have started to make plans for reclamation.

Changing Pastoral Life Under Fences

Land use concerns are not only economic but also cultural. As Turner (2002) points out, ways of making a living are closely related to ethnic identity. The majority (90 percent) of those managing Uxin Ju’s rural landscape are Mongols, whose traditional lifestyle was nomadic grazing. As pastures and sand dunes become constrained by fences, mobility for both livestock and pastoralists ends. In livestock raising, increases in cropping and planting have shifted the past reliance on natural pasture to increasing dependence on human-produced biomass. On the positive side, planted trees (leaves), shrubs, grasses, as well as crops have provided additional forage and feed, and this has made livestock grazing more resistant to drought and winter shortage. The pastoral economy has thus been improved. But economic benefits come with costs and consequences. First, as a result of pasture improvement and protection, goats, a traditional livestock, have been eliminated since they “destroy the planted trees” and “browse bare the pastures” (Wushen Qi 2001). Goats’ durability and adaptability to the dry, shrubby vegetation has now become their liability. After several decades of reduction, by 1999, the number of goats had been reduced to 73 from 40,000-60,000 in the 1970s. Goats may indeed be maladapted to the newly created landscape, yet the impact of their removal on local diet and health warrants careful research. A second consequence is that rotational grazing, practiced over large areas in the past, has now become impossible. While livestock privatization encourages the growth of sheep numbers, sheep are now grazed for longer periods of time (two months at a minimum) on one piece of pasture within fences.

Rotational grazing in enclosures is the Mongols’ way of adapting to the new social and environmental situations. Traditional nomadic grazing involves frequent movement of herds on large open pastureland. Uxin Ju people call it zouchang (walking the field). This extensive mobility not only protects the pastureland from overuse, but also encourages more efficient use of pastureland resources (Humphrey and Sneath 1999). Nomadic grazing started to be limited after the 1600s when the Qing court restricted Mongol princes to fixed banner lands (Barfield 1989). With the establishment of communes in 1958 under the socialist regime, land was further divided according to the basic production unit of a brigade (about 20 to 30 households). Limited long-distance movement was still possible as Uxin Ju swapped land use with Otog banner to the west and grazed on their highland stony shrub in the summer. Now, with fences and household management, pastureland is too divided to allow for any extensive movement of livestock. Pastoralists have adjusted to this new pastoral condition by rotational grazing on their small patches of pasture inside fences. Grazing on other households’ pastureland is still practiced, but the relationship is that of land rent rather than land-use swapping. Some households rent pastureland from others at a fixed fee and use it more intensively; some pay according to sheep number and length of grazing to graze their sheep on others’ allocated pastureland. However, neither of these methods helps protect the pastureland as mobility did in the past. It is not surprising that Williams (2001) suspects that pastureland distribution might have marked a greater transformation of pastoral life than collectivization in 1958.

With fences, the migratory routine of human life is disappearing, and in its place is the settled routine of a busy life. Although livestock can be left to graze in fenced enclosures without much supervision, thus reducing labor requirements for grazing, overall labor demands have drastically increased. With trees to plant, tree leaves to cut, crops to irrigate and cultivate, fences to mend, and more work required to feed the improved sheep variety and to prevent disease, pastoralists’ daily routines have become much more labor-intensive. To illustrate, Bayinsongbuer complained that he had to spend two to three months each year mending fences. The cropping season is especially labor-intensive for pastoralists who are not used to the rhythm of farming. It is no wonder that my interviewees commented about the loss of leisure life. When asked whether they would trade their current busier but materially richer lifestyle for their past leisure, however, most of my interviewees indicated that they would not. This juxtaposition of complaint and acceptance points to the pastoralists’ internal conflicts between tradition and change.

Williams (2001) maintains that pastureland privatization represents Chinese cultural and political imposition. Household use is a familiar relationship to the land for the Chinese farmers, and the tendency to fix people to particular locations comes from the farming tradition. But for the Mongols, pastureland has traditionally been used as a common resource. As a traditionally Mongolian area, Uxin Ju has long been under the influence of Chinese culture and politics, and change in land use is closely related to the process of Sinicization. I would submit that in Uxin Ju, such influence is not as hegemonic as Williams suggests. Many Mongols have learned to adapt to the lifestyle change under fences, and have started to embrace planting and cropping as an integral part of Mongolian identity (see Jiang 2004 for details). Ironically, the Mongols’ acceptance of sedentarized agropastoralism, while culturally empowering, seems only to accelerate the loss of traditional nomadism.

Ecological processes and uneven landscape consequences of reclamation

Unlike flat land, sandy land is undulating and rolling; it is a landscape of elasticity created by the movement of sand and pasture. As sand dunes move with the direction of the wind, new pastures are created on locations the dunes have just vacated. This dune land remains resilient to moving sand, in contrast to the common view that this land is fragile and easily sandified (e.g. Sun Jinzhu 1990). Bare sand dunes serve important roles in supporting functions of the landscape. Precipitation quickly filtrates into the ground to supplement the groundwater, which in turn, supplies water for the lowland. Moving sand dunes are considered areas of “water provision.” Instead of being “wastelands,” moving dunes are a crucial component on the landscape that nurtures the key lowland pastures. Research done by the Chinese Academy of Science led by Zhang Xinshi shows that if planting on sand dunes is too dense, not only will the established vegetation die off after a few years, but the adjacent lowland will also be adversely affected (Zhang 2001).

Two reasons explain why moving sand is now considered a problem to society. First, pastureland overuse has caused more sand to be exposed. Not only has the number of livestock increased but grazing intensity has also been heightened with fences. In 1998, official statistics showed that about 50 percent of Uxin Ju was occupied by moving sand, much of which was considered to be caused by human misuse. Many scholars emphasize the human causes and human control of sand expansion (Huang et al. 1986; Sun 1990), and most people I interviewed believe that much of the sandy land can be improved. Expansion of sand is seen as a major problem that reduces usable pastureland. Instead of seeing moving sand as a natural function of the landscape, scholars and local people use it as a measure of degradation. Once put in the category of degraded land, sandy land has to be reformed.  Second, the mobility of sand challenges sedentary lifestyles. In nomadic societies, as sand moved, so did people, thus, the human relationship with the sandy land environment was more harmonious (Chen 2001). Such mobility, however, was only possible when intensity of use was low. Now that people are more densely settled, mobility of sand has become hazardous to houses, animal shelters, and roads (Huang et al. 1986). The elasticity of the dune landscape contradicts with the fixed allocation of household pastureland. As a result, households attempt to constrain sand dunes and to prevent dune sand from moving onto their pastureland.

Despite the human efforts to secure the landscape with fences, natural processes continue: sand moves across fences. When sand control is not successful, movement of sand across fences creates conflicts between households such as was the case for Ererdun and his neighbor. Ererdun has made tremendous efforts to reclaim most of his sandy land, but his neighbor in the windward northwest direction has not controlled his sand in the enclosure adjacent to Ererdun’s. A moving sand dune, previously 20 m away, has now crossed the fence and covered Ererdun’s pasture, consequently creating a new piece of pastureland within the neighbor’s fence. With pastureland distribution fixed for 30 years, such neighborly disputes cannot be truly mitigated. Like wildlife that cannot be restrained within conservation boundaries (Naughton-Treves et al. 2003), moving sand does not obey the authority of fences.

Sandy land reclamation inside fences has come with an unintended environmental cost across the landscape. The rapid increase in trees and irrigation has lowered groundwater levels, a problem which has only been exacerbated by the recent drought from 1999 to 2001. This has caused the reduction in inter-dune vegetation and enabled the expansion of sand dunes. Although tremendous effort is devoted to keeping the sandy land “fixed,” it can only succeed in limited areas, and given the connection of the landscape to groundwater, this fixation of landscape in some locations has come at the cost of more moving sand in other locations. With groundwater remaining a “common” resource, household-based pastureland use produces ecological externalities that have not been considered in the privatization of land use. As a result, despite—and partly because of—an upswing in land reclamation, bare sandy areas have also increased. A new pattern on the landscape, a landscape of polarization, has been created, with the expansion and spatial congregation of both planted trees and moving sand dunes. Remote sensing analysis shows that from 1973 to 1997, vegetation with high biomass (mostly planted) in Uxin Ju increased from 102,000 to 428,700 mu, and moving sand also increased from 645,000 to over 1.2 million mu (Jiang 2004). The bounded condition produced by fencing, while increasing the incentives for investment and reclamation, is leading to environmental problems on a broader scale. 

While the increases in planted trees and moving sand may somehow counterbalance each other in terms of the total production of the sandy land, lowland pasture remains victimized by sandy land reclamation. The lowering of groundwater directly worsens the lowland water conditions. Groundwater reduction has been confirmed by remote sensing analysis and interviews. Remote sensing analysis shows that from 1973 to 1997, the area of surface water decreased from 79,890 to 36,500 mu. Since lowland surface water is linked with the shallow layer of groundwater, a reduction in surface water bodies serves to indicate a lowered groundwater table. Interviewees pointed out a 2 to 4 m lowering of the groundwater table in their irrigation wells. The increased number of livestock and lack of grazing mobility have only worsened the deterioration of lowland pasture. One interviewee commented that “in the past sheep could hide in Carex pasture, but now you can see rabbits running in it.” The degradation of Uxin Ju’s jewel lowland pasture reduces the capacity for livestock grazing, and has, in part, resulted in the need for sandy land reclamation. An informant from Buridu gacha, Baole, put it aptly, “In the past livestock could eat their fill on the pasture, but now, they have to rely on planted fodder and feed as supplement.” The forage and feed provided by tree leaves and planted shrubs, grass, and crops, however, have come at a greater cost in terms of human labor. A cycle of increased use, reclamation, and degradation has been set off by decentralization.

Newly created inequality, and a new need for conservation

The sandy land environment, highly variable in time and space and highly influenced by human interventions, is better described by disequilibrium dynamics (Behnke, Scoones and Kerven 1994; Wu and Loucks 1995). This requires that we understand environmental dynamics beyond the aggregate notion of degradation or improvement (Leach, Mearns, and Scoones, 1999). Ecological processes connect neighbors and communities, and uneven changes on the landscape call for the sharing of ecological and economic risks. But privatization has effectively destroyed the culture and economy of sharing, and the fixing of pastureland to individual households and fences has created winners and losers.

Inequality among households has emerged. Three kinds of households are poor: those with disabilities, those lacking labor, and those having poor-quality pastureland. It is probably common in any society that the first two kinds of households suffer from poverty; the last kind of poverty has to do with fences. As mentioned earlier, pastureland is distributed according to where people live. People with lowland and less sandy pastures have not only better grazing conditions but also more favorable land to improve upon. People living on sandy land have sandy pastures, and fences prohibit them from grazing elsewhere. Although pasture areas allocated to households are equalized through their conversion to standard pasture, much of the sandy pasture has become even sandier due to the overall pattern of landscape change, as explained earlier. Households living on more sandy areas disproportionately bear more of the negative ecological consequences. A clear illustration of such conditions is provided by Labai and her two adult sons, one of the poor households the government supported in recent years. They have 2,400 mu of poor-quality sandy pastureland, equivalent to 134 mu in standard pasture. With limits on sheep grazing, they did not have sufficient cash to invest in irrigation wells and equipment, so they lagged behind other households in diversifying land use. Their lack of capital in reclamation only exacerbated the degradation of their allocated pastureland. In 1997, they took a government loan to dig an irrigation well for ten mu of cropland, and the government supported them with cash for seeds and fertilizers. They had only 750 trees, compared to the average of 2,800 trees from my sample households. Although they did have enough food, their poverty clearly showed in their almost bare house when I visited in 1999.

The spatial association of sandy pasture and poverty is also found over large areas. Buridu gacha, for example, is more sandy, and reclamation efforts there have not achieved anticipated results. Planting did draw sand dunes lower than before, but the total area of sandy land has increased. An analysis of remote sensing images shows that from 1973 to 1997, moving sand in Buridu more than doubled in area, increasing from 316,000 mu to 645,000 mu. In comparison, during the same period, Chahanmiao gacha had only a 37 percent increase of moving sand from 123,000 mu to 168,000 mu. Given the rapid expansion of moving sand, people in Buridu are much less sanguine about human efforts to improve sandy land than those in Chahanmiao gacha.

In 2001, in an attempt to recover seriously degraded pastureland and to help the poor households living on it, the Inner Mongolian regional government launched an “ecological migration” program that funds the relocation of people from the most degraded areas. The program was initiated as a response to a new central agenda to develop the western regions. In 1999, to promote economic development in China’s west, which had lagged behind the eastern region, the beneficiary of economic reform policies, the Chinese government put forth various policies and financial incentives under the umbrella of a Western Region Development (WRD) strategy. Since much of the “western region” suffers from ecological degradation, funding and programs for ecological improvement became an important part of WRD. In Inner Mongolia, funds for tree planting have increased, including rewards for people who convert rain-fed cropland to the planting of trees (Feng 2000). The “ecological migration” program emerged in this context. In Ih Ju league, 10,000 people were on the move list in 2001. The league plans to move 68,000 people by 2005. In Uxin Ju, 100 households in the most sandy Buridu gacha were on the move list, and each household was to be subsidized by 20,000 Yuan ($2,400) to settle in Chahanmiao, a local town. Use of their allocated pastureland will be banned for five years, by which time, if the pastureland recovers, people can then move back. Since life in the town has been an attractive alternative to pastoral life, more households desire to join the program than the government funds can assist. We have yet to see the success of such temporary relocation. The idea of permanent closure of degraded areas has also been contemplated by the regional and local governments, and development of small towns is seen as the primary way to absorb the relocated population (Interviews 2001).

Other than strict conservation, programs that restrain use have also been tested. One program experimented with by Ih-Ju league is a move toward grazing bans on all pastures during the entire warm season, so that pastureland degradation can be alleviated. The pastoralists in Uxin Ju reacted with serious doubts. During interviews in 2001, my informants voiced concerns about not having enough labor to care for livestock raised in stalls; they also questioned whether it is suitable to keep sheep in stalls and whether that practice would deteriorate the quality of sheep wool, a main market product of the local economy. Moreover, they feared that the grazing ban would undermine the household economy. The local government officials realize the danger of economic compromise. As one administrator in Ih-Ju League put it, the “(Grazing ban) uses the local people’s economic interests in exchange for the nation’s ecological benefit; the (central) government should lend us financial support” (Interviews 2001). The support that has come has been sorely insufficient, leaving the local government scrambling to meet both economic and ecological goals.

Conclusion

In the previous two chapters in this volume, Sundberg and Gray have each explored problems of decentralized resource use at the community level that originated in political processes. This paper examines household-based pastureland management in China from ecological and cultural perspectives. Echoing Sundberg and Gray, I show that decentralization in Inner Mongolia has not delivered the desired outcome of sustainable use and economic empowerment for all. After the pastureland was distributed to households and fenced, more intense use has followed, leading to pastureland degradation. Means’ (1993) warning of detrimental environmental impacts of pastureland privatization has not been heeded. Even more important, efforts to fix the mobile sand have created their own set of unintended problems. While the sandy land has been more aggressively reclaimed through the planting of trees, shrubs, grass and even crops, sand continues to move across fences, creating conflicts between neighbors. Moreover, ecological processes operate at the landscape level, and improvements in certain areas, which draw on and thus lower the groundwater level, only serve to exacerbate degradation at other locations that are more vulnerable (i.e. more sandy locations or the lowland). Thus, uneven landscape change has occurred. Although initial distribution of pastureland was based upon equality among all individuals, post-distribution variability in landscape change has led some to bear more than their fair share of pastureland degradation, since household-based pastureland use in the reform era has effectively eliminated the sharing of ecological and economic risks in the community. Decentralization in Uxin Ju has created winners and losers, not through struggle to access as in the cases of Sundberg and Gray, but because of the mismatch between dynamic ecological changes and the bounded decentralized resource use at the household level.

Another important consequence of pastureland privatization and sandy land reclamation concerns changes in lifestyle. As pastures are fenced, and trees, shrubs, and crops planted, the nomadic lifestyle becomes impossible. Uxin Ju is going through rapid transformations, and most people are eager to accept these changes. Still, reclamation with fences leaves little room for traditional grazing practices, thereby placing an additional burden on the pastoralists to accept change as a new way of life. This is not to say that these changes are entirely detrimental to the society. While nomadic mobility is disappearing, the Mongols have gained other kinds of mobility, including economic mobility and increased opportunity to adopt an expanded array of economic and land-use practices. However, the alternative mobility cannot replace the important ecological and cultural value of nomadic mobility.

Gray (this volume) questions whether community is the right scale for resource management; my study casts doubts on households as an appropriate level of use due to the inconsistency of household- and fence-based grassland use with local ecological and cultural processes. Policy implications of this study are threefold. First, to consider ecological processes at the landscape level, household resource use must be assisted with collective management, taking ecological science seriously. Second, the community must build socio-economic mechanisms to alleviate economic inequalities; only then would sound collective management be possible. Lastly, elements of traditional nomadism should be considered, especially for the seriously degraded areas that call for stricter conservation. This study shows that decentralization has offered some hope for economic growth and grassland improvement, but more challenges for long-term sustainable use.

References

Assetto, V. J., E. Hajba, and S. P. Mumme. 2003. Democratization, decentralization, and local environmental policy capacity: Hungary and Mexico. The Social Science Journal 40 (2):  249-68

Bakir, H.A. 2001. Sustainable wastewater management for small communities in the Middle East and North Africa. Journal of Environmental Management 61 (4): 319-28.

Banks, T. 2001. Property rights and the environment in pastoral China: Evidence from the field. Development and Change 32(4): 717-40.

Barfield, T. J. 1989. The perilous frontier. Nomadic empires and China, 221 BC to AD 1757.  Cambridge, MA: Blackwell.

Behnke, R.H., I. Scoones and C. Kerven. 1994. Range ecology at disequilibrium: New models of natural variability and pastoral adaptation in African savannas. Westview Press.

Bennett, R. J. ed. 1990. Decentralization, local governments and markets. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Brandon, K., K. H. Redford, and S. Sanderson. 1998. Parks in peril: People, politics, and protected areas. Island Press.

Lavigne, M. 1999. The economics of transition: From socialist economy to market economy. New York: St. Martin's Press.

Chen, Y. 2001. Meng gu zu wen hua de sheng tai xue si kao (Ecological implication of Mongolian culture). Nei Meng Gu She Hui Ke Xue (Social Science of Inner Mongolia), No. 5: 34-37.

de Oliveria, J. A. P. 2002. Implementing environmental policies in developing countries through decentralization: The case of protected areas in Bahia, Brazil. World Development 30 (10): 1713-36.

Feng, G. 2000. Tui geng huan lin zheng ce fen xi yu jian yi (Policy analysis and recommendations for returning cultivation to trees). Lin Ye Jing Ji (Forestry Economics) No. 5: 6-13.

Huang Z. et al. 1986. Nei meng gu yi ke zhao meng tu di sha mo hua ji qi fang zhi (Desertification and its control in Ih Ju league, Inner Mongolia). Zhong Guo Ke Xue Yuan Lan Zhou Shan Mo Yan Jiu Suo Ji Kan (Memoirs of Institute of Desert, Academia Sinica) No. 3: 35-48.

Humphrey, C., and D. Sneath, eds. 1999. End of nomadism? Society, state and the environment in Inner Asia. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Jia, H, and Z. Lin. 1994. Changing central-local relations in China. Boulder: Westview.

Jiang, H. 1999. The Ordos Plateau of China: An Endangered Environment. Tokyo: United Nations University Press.

Jiang, H. 2004. Cooperation, land use, and the environment in Uxin Ju: A changing landscape of a Mongolian-Chinese borderland in China. Annals of Association of American Geographers 94 (1): 117-39.

Jiang, H. n.d. Decentralization, ecological construction, and the environment in post-reform China: Case study from Uxin banner, Inner Mongolia. World Development.

Kung, J. K., and S. Liu. 1997. Farmers’ preferences regarding ownership and land tenure in post-Mao China: Unexpected evidence from eight counties. The China Journal No. 38: 33-63. 

Lane, M. B. 2003. Decentralization or privatization of environmental governance? Forest conflict and bioregional assessment in Australia. Journal of Rural Studies 19 (3): 283-94.

Leach, M., R. Mearns, and I. Scoones. 1999. Environmental entitlements: Dynamics and institutions in community-based natural resource management. World Development 27 (2): 225-47.

Lin, G. (1999). State policy and spatial restructuring in post-reform China, 1978-95. International Journal of Urban Research, 23(4), 670-97. 

Liu, M., and Y. Wang. 1998. Yi ke zhao meng cao ku lun jian she he li yong diao cha bao gao (Investigation report on the construction and use of pasture enclosure in Ih Ju League). Nei Meng Gu Cao Ye (Inner Mongolia Grass Industry), No. 2: 17-19.

Lutz, E., and J. Caldecott, eds. 1996. Decentralization and biodiversity conservation. Washington D.C.: The World Bank.

McMillan, J., and B. Naughton. 1996. Reforming Asian socialism: The growth of market institutions. Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press.

Means, R. 1993. Territoriality and land tenure among Mongolian pastoralists: variation, continuity, and change. Nomadic Peoples 33: 73-103.

Nemarundwe, N. 2004. Social charters and organisation for access to woodlands: Institutional implications for devolving responsibilities for resource management to the local level in Chivi district, Zimbabwe. Society and Natural Resources, 17(4): 279-91.

Naughton-Treves, L., V. C. Radeloff, J. L. Mena, A. Treves, and N. Alvarez  2003. Wildlife Survival Beyond Park Boundaries: The Impact of Slash-and-Burn Agriculture and Hunting on Mammals in Tambopata, Peru. Conservation Biology 17 (4): 1106-17.

Ribot, J. C. 1999. Accountable representation and power in participatory and decentralized environmental management. Unasylva 50, No.199: 18-22.

Shroeder, R.A. 1999. Geographies of environmental intervention in Africa. Progress in Human Geography 23(3): 359-78.

Sun, J. 1990. Er er duo si gao yuan sheng tai huan jing zheng zh de zhan lue yan jin (Strategic analysis of eco-environmental control of the Ordos Plateau). Gan Han Qu Zi Yuan Yu Huan Jing (Journal of Arid Land Resources and Environment) 4(4): 45-50.

Sundberg, J. 1999. Conservation encounters: NGOs, local people, and changing cultural landscapes. Dissertation, Geography Department, University of Texas, Austin.

Thwaites, R, T. de Lacy, Y. H. Li, and X. H. Liu. 1998. Property rights, social change, and grassland degradation in Xilingol Biosphere Reserve, Inner Mongolia, China. Society and Natural Resources 11 (4): 319-38.

Turner, M. 1999. Central-local relations: Themes and issues. In Central-local relations in Asia-Pacific: Convergence or divergence, ed. M. Turner, 1-28, Hampshire, UK: Macmillan Press.

Turner, M. 2002. Moral dimensions of “resource struggles” and their treatment in political ecology. Paper presented at the Annual meeting of AAG, March 22, Los Angeles, CA. 

Unger, J. 2002. The transformation of rural China. New York: M. E. Sharpe.

Weber, E. P. 2000. A new vanguard for the environment: grass-roots ecosystem management as a new environmental movement. Society and Natural Resources 13 (3): 237-59.

Williams, D. M. 2001. Beyond the Great Wall: Environment, identidy, and development on the Chinese grasslands of Inner Mongolia. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Williams, M. D., and M. P. Wells. 1996. Russia. In Decentralization and biodiversity conservation, eds. E. Lutz and J. Caldecott, 109-122. Washington D.C.: The World Bank.

World Bank. 1997. World development report: The state in a changing world. New York: Oxford University Press.

Wu, J., and O. Loucks 1995. From balance of nature to hierarchical patch dynamics: A paradigm shift in ecology. Quarterly Review of Biology 70: 439-66.

Wushen Qi (Uxin banner). 2001. (Wushen qi jinmu xiumu lunmu zaixing banfa (Temporary regulations in rotational grazing and closing of pastureland from grazing). Unpublished government document.

Zhang, T. 2000. Land market forces and government’s role in sprawl: The case of China. Cities 17 (2): 123-35.

Zhang, X. 2001. Personal communication.

Figure 1.  Map of Study Area

<Back>