Under the impact of climate change, pastoral areas of China have experienced increasing frequency and intensity of extreme events, which has brought more challenges to pastoralists’ livelihood. Adaptive governance refers to increasing resilience through collaborative, flexible, and learning-oriented management on different scales to form a set of political, social, economic, and administrative systems for the development, management, and allocation of resources. As such, it provides a useful framework and benchmark for enhancing adaptive capacity. However, how to implement adaptive governance in practice is still an unresolved problem. Under the current property regime, which individualized grassland use rights with wire fences built to demarcate boundaries, pastoralists of different places have tried to increase their adaptability to reduce the loss caused by disasters. Some succeeded, but some failed. Based on household surveys and an comparative analysis of four cases in pastoral areas of China, this article presents their climate change risk and changes in land use arrangements, explores the reasons for their different adaptability by comparing their coping strategies with the adaptive governance features, and finally illustrates the challenges influencing the application of adaptive governance at the local level.

After two decades of implementing top-down grassland restoration projects focused on reducing livestock numbers and pastoralist populations, the Chinese government’s well-funded efforts have not significantly reversed grassland degradation. This study reviews the institutional changes in grassland management over the past forty years, highlighting the Livestock and Grassland Double Contract Household Responsibility System of the early 1980s and the Grassland Ecological Reward and Compensation Policy introduced in 2011. It demonstrates how these institutional transformations have shaped pastoralists’ evolving understanding of grassland value and reveals that commodifying grassland’s economic and ecological value has led to the capitalization of nature, disembedding husbandry from grassland production, and undermining the effectiveness of conservation projects. This article also showcases the development of grassland ecology research in China, noting its increasing detachment from a holistic understanding of ecosystems and the interdisciplinary needs of management practices. The disjunction between grassland ecology research and practical management has resulted in a lack of techniques aligned with local ecological and socioeconomic contexts. This article champions active engagement with and protection of pastoralist communities to reintegrate grasslands’ true economic and ecological value into management practices, thereby effectively restoring degraded grasslands and achieving sustainable management.