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The annotated article can be viewed on the publisher's website.

Data Generation & Analysis

This article is one of six resulting from an interdisciplinary, collaborative NSF-funded project that sought to investigate the multiple (social and ecological) correlates of rangeland status on the Tibetan Plateau. The project was motivated by the fact that rigorous studies of putative causes of rangeland degradation on the Tibetan Plateau have been lacking, and as a result, policies are being implemented without clear rationale or evidence. These same policies are often both ecologically ineffective and socially and culturally detrimental to Tibetan communities. The project combined repeated vegetation sampling on fixed plots, an exclosure experiment, and GPS tracking of livestock with intensive interviews with herders. While several of the articles resulting from the study are very interdisciplinary in nature, this article is primarily an interpretive article based on qualitative data, though some of the arguments are made in relation to the results of the vegetation studies.

More specifically, this article identifies three major assumptions of the Chinese state’s grassland policies, and uses qualitative evidence to refute each one.

Data Analysis

Because the primary goal of the larger project was to understand specific management practices of pastoralist households and correlate them to their vegetation outcomes, and because of the intensive nature of the vegetation sampling, we chose as participating households the ones on whose pastures the biophysical measurements were being done. Coauthor Gaerrang conducted at least two sets of interviews with each household from June through August 2009, as well as follow-up interviews in summer 2010. He also collected numerous village-level statistics and documents relevant to grassland management. Coauthors Yeh and Harris also conducted interviews with Gaerrang in July 2009. Gaerrang followed up with phone calls in 2011 to households with clarifying questions after data analysis began. Coauthor Samberg made a visit to Gouli in 2013 and coauthor Volkmar conducted a final round of follow-up interviews in summer 2014. Most of the interviews were conducted in the local dialect of Tibetan by Gaerrang, and in other cases through translation by him or one of several Tibetan field assistants. Some of the Tibetan interviews were recorded and then transcribed into English, while others took notes directly in English based on translation.

In hindsight, for this article it would have been helpful to have interviewed more households. However, we were focused at the time of the design of the study on teasing out differences in management on the pastures on which we were collecting biophysical data. In making some of the arguments presented here, I drew upon broader contextual knowledge of processes across Tibetan pastoral areas, such as about ideas of the “essence” of the soil (sa bcud).

Analysis of the qualitative interview data used for this article was done through organizing and coding of interview transcript files and policy text files. I used descriptive and analytical codes to analyze the data. Most of the data were interview transcripts, but they also included tables of livestock holdings over time (often with incomplete entries), as well as summaries of management over time by pasture (rather than herder) written by Gaerrang based on his extended observations and first round of interviews. Particular attention was given to contradictory statements, such as when herders seemed to invoke a non-equilibrium understanding of rangeland ecology in some interviews, but not in others. Important coding categories also included precipitation/drought, snowstorms, livestock number, labor, and numerous types of contracts. Discourse analysis of policy documents resulted in the identification of the three arguments around which the article is based.

Logic of Annotation

The vast majority of annotations are to source excerpt translations: English excerpts of interview transcripts. This is for several reasons: the secondary sources are all already fully cited and easily available, and second, most of the data collected and analyzed was in the form of interviews, rather than written documents. Interviews are most relevant to examine how we drew conclusions, but space limitations for the article meant that only a small number could be selected. The annotations thus largely provide further examples in support of the observations made or conclusions drawn. While Tibetan language audio recordings do exist in some cases, only a very small fraction of potential readers would be able to make use of them. For annotation purposes, the excerpt translations had to have herders’ names removed, and they were also edited for grammar.

Though most of the annotations are interview excerpts, I also strove where possible to provide other forms of documentation that would provide greater transparency. In particular, I included our initial, lengthy semi-structured interview guide for the reader to be able to see the instrument used to collect data. I also included a photograph of the field site for further contextualization, as well as two difficult-to-obtain documents, one in Chinese and one in Tibetan, that provide further context and evidence on the policy assumptions around which the paper is framed.

For the most part, I did not feel that the arguments made in the article were particularly controversial or contested in the research community, and thus I did not use analytical notes to refute potential criticisms. Given the nature of argumentation in this article, they largely support descriptive claims.

Update Notes for Version 2.0

Version 2.0 is a QDR-administered technical update. Files have been reprocessed to improve digital accessibility; the content of materials remains unaltered.