The Grassland Ecological Compensation Policy (GECP) is a key set of policy instruments designed to alleviate grassland degradation and increase herdsmen’s income. However, considering the various constraints and obstacles that policies often face in actual operation, it may not be able to achieve the expected goals. In order to test the real income effect of GECP and clarify its mechanism, based on the data of 499 counties in Chinese pastoralist provinces from 2000 to 2019, this paper uses the difference-in-differences (DID) model to empirically test the impact of GECP on herdsmen’s income from the dual perspective of income growth and income gap. This analysis not only evaluates the impact and mechanism of GECP on income growth in more detail, but also broadens the existing research perspective from the perspective of the income gap. The major study findings are as follows: (1) GECP significantly promotes income for herdsmen, with a marginal effect of 0.078. (2) The mechanism analysis indicates the GECP improves the income of herdsmen through the direct effect of increasing transfer income and the indirect effect of optimizing the allocation of labor, and promoting the livestock scale of barn feeding. (3) With respect to the income gap, this paper finds that areas with relatively high levels of development benefit more from GECP, which will widen the income gap between regions for herdsmen.

Many countries have established grassroots forestry institutions to manage and protect small-scale forestry resources and provide technology and services to private foresters. Since the inception of township forestry workstations (TFWs) in China almost 70 years ago, TFW has supported resource protection and forest property reform. In this paper, we employ fixed effect models to test the effects of TFW on collective forest carbon density and provide evidence for improving the quality of collective forests. Our results demonstrate that TFWs in China improve the carbon density of collective forests by performing forestry management and service functions. However, significant differences in TFWs exist under different management systems, and the dual leadership township forestry workstation (D_TWF) is more effective in increasing the carbon density of collective forests. The management system’s heterogeneity directly affects its performance, with D_TWF performing better management functions and the single leadership township forestry workstation (S_TWF) performing better service functions. These results underscore the importance of reforming the TFW management system in accordance with local conditions. In areas with abundant forest resources, the TFW’s management system should shift to single leadership (jurisdictional or vertical management). In forest resource-scarce regions, the TFW’s management system should change to dual leadership.