Microcredit loans are now common for Inner Mongolian pastoralists and are encouraged by government policy on the basis of their previous success for poverty alleviation. However, the effects of the highly variable weather characteristics of many semiarid rangelands on the efficacy of microcredit have not been fully examined. Pastoralists in our study area are often trapped in a vicious cycle of borrowing more each year to pay for previous debt and the next year’s production. Instead of helping to maintain herds through bad years, microcredit has often led to reduced herds and assets. To understand why, a qualitative, interview-based approach was used to determine the kinds of loans taken out and why they are taken out, as well as to assess household livestock sales, income, and costs in three villages. In poor years, 82% of households used loans to purchase winter forage. However, borrowers sold more livestock because the standard 1-yr loan term, combined with weather and market conditions, often forced sales for repayment. Weather and market variation made annual income and costs difficult to anticipate. Loans became an added household risk, another way that environment can influence the social and economic interactions of a rangeland social-ecological system. Longer-term loans could smooth the uncertainty of weather and market conditions, and supplementary measures such as government subsidies or forage insurance could buffer the inevitable but unpredictable bad years. Globally, study of the impacts of nonequilibrial ecological dynamics on economic and policy institutions would help to understand why many development initiatives have failed in such systems.
Economic, policy, and climate changes have profoundly influenced pastoral social-ecological systems on the Tibetan Plateau. Climate change is believed to be leading to increasing extreme weather conditions such as snow disasters and droughts, putting a strain on the rangeland resources herders must have to increase income. Market-based economic reforms and interrelated development policies such as the Rangeland Household Contract Policy, the Ecological Construction Project, and herder settlement Initiatives have increased integration of pastoral regions into modern markets with promotion of tourism, expanded livestock markets, and marketing opportunities for rangeland resources. Although allocating common rangelands to households is the foundation of current rangeland management strategies to achieve these goals, it removes important technologies for coping with high variability in rangeland forage production from the traditional rangeland management portfolio on the Tibetan Plateau. These include shared risk, shared labor, seasonal and yearly herd mobility, and access to diverse areas of rangelands and multiple water sources. Field study of two villages in Guinan County of Qinghai Province, and Ruoergai County of Sichuan Province from 2011 to 2014 found that the villages responded to externally driven policy, economic, and climate changes with an innovative locally adapted quota-based grazing management system that preserves valuable management technologies, conserves rangeland resources, and provides individual opportunities for financial gain. In this way the village social-ecological system has exhibited considerable resiliency, maintaining a form of community governance that functions to manage the rangelands, improve well-being as indicated by livestock productivity, and, according to local perceptions, maintain rangeland condition. The community-based grazing quota system devised by the villages occupies a middle ground between common and individual models for resource use because it focuses more on how to equitably distribute services and utilities from rangelands, instead of how to distribute rangelands.