Co-management for sustainable development and conservation in Sanjiangyuan National Park and the surrounding Tibetan nomadic pastoralist areas

The Qinghai-Tibet Plateau plays an essential role in national to regional ecological security, biodiversity conservation, and sustaining livelihood. An array of natural resource management, environmental conservation, and ecological restoration projects have been trialed and implemented in recent years in the vast Sanjiangyuan region of the central Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, aiming especially to ensure socio-ecologically appropriate and sustainable development of animal husbandry in the alpine grasslands. Novel approaches in China have included the introduction of more collaborative approaches in protected area management and the development and formal establishment of a new multi-purpose national park system. Many milestones have been achieved. However, such developments are driven largely by national and global goals and very little has been heard to date directly from the people most affected: those residing within the protected landscapes, i.e. the community stakeholders themselves. This empirical, perceptions-based study aims to partially fill this gap, drawing on the results of focus group discussions with community representatives supplemented by key informant interviews and a targeted review of the literature, to provide synthesized feedback and priority recommendations for improving “community co-management” collaborations for the joint benefit of Tibetan herders and protected areas. The mixed-method approach employed in this study was based on a conceptual model derived from Elinor Ostrom’s social–ecological systems framework, calibrated to local residents’ self-assessments of their household well-being. Results highlight how the most recent configuration of China’s national park model (i.e., its form and the approaches it utilizes) is generally deemed successful by community stakeholders, albeit with some notable perceived limitations mainly relating to a sense of lack of fairness and inclusiveness in the “one household, one post” co-management mechanism. The paper closes with discussion and recommendations around fundamental issues of equity, empowerment, and gender, finally pointing to the significance and, ultimately, the need to move even beyond co-management per se and to adopt a model of inclusive governance for conservation wherein joint deliberations and decision-making amongst diverse stakeholders are prioritized over the simple implementation of externally developed programs and management plans.