Collective action remains a fundamental approach to governing common pool resources, and Ostrom’s design principles (DPs) have been widely used for analyzing such governance. However, grasslands, as typical common pool resources, have received limited attention within this framework in China. Based on the village-level survey data in Yushu, Qinghai, we utilized DPs as fuzzy sets to discern nuances among cases and identify necessary and sufficient conditions for successful collective governance using the fsQCA method. Our findings are as follows: (i) Diverse combinations of institutional rules can lead to favorable collective governance outcomes. Achieving good outcomes requires a comprehensive approach that encompasses rules, rule enforcement, and rule-making arenas. (ii) Congruence with local conditions (DP2) emerges as a pivotal and foundational condition in collective grassland governance. Therefore, it is crucial to formulate strategic governance rules that adapt to local realities and capitalize on regional advantages to ensure long-term success. (iii) The establishment of ecological husbandry cooperatives is in line with local realities and can help achieve high grassland governance performance. The improvement in ecological, economic, and social benefits brought about by cooperatives constitutes a crucial factor for promoting herders’ active involvement in the collective management of grasslands.

Accurately assessing grassland carrying status and its temporal dynamics is essential for implementing forage-based livestock management and advancing grassland ecological restoration. However, existing assessments often consider only natural grassland feed while overlooking other feed sources, which may lead to an underestimation of the total feed resources available for livestock production and introduce substantial uncertainty into assessments of forage–livestock balance. To address this limitation, we construct two accounting frameworks for assessing forage–livestock balance across eight provinces and autonomous regions encompassing China’s major pastoral and agro-pastoral areas. One framework considered natural-grassland forage alone, while the other also included cultivated-grassland forage and agricultural straw. Reasonable livestock carrying capacity and the carrying capacity index (CCI) were calculated under both frameworks and compared using temporal trend analysis, paired t-tests, and a ±10% parameter sensitivity analysis. Across the eight study regions, natural grassland forage accounted for an average of 86.53% of the estimated carrying capacity, while agricultural straw and cultivated-grassland forage contributed 11.25% and 2.22%, respectively. The combined contribution of these supplementary resources varied substantially among provinces, ranging from 1.08% in Qinghai and 1.30% in Xizang to 46.95% in Yunnan. Incorporating supplementary feed significantly increased estimated carrying capacity and reduced the CCI compared with the natural-grassland-only framework (both p < 0.001). The reduction was greatest in Yunnan, Ningxia, and Gansu. Nevertheless, the mean CCI remained above 1 throughout 2000–2020, and seven of the eight provinces remained overstocked under the comprehensive framework. The results were robust to the alternative parameter scenarios. These findings demonstrate that excluding cultivated forage and agricultural straw systematically overestimates regional overstocking, particularly in agro-pastoral regions, although incorporating these resources does not eliminate the underlying imbalance between feed supply and livestock demand.

Black soil regions are among the world’s major grain-producing areas and are also key regions for the implementation of conservation tillage. However, whether and how conservation tillage is related to farmers’ production resilience remains insufficiently understood. To address this research gap, this study develops a multidimensional evaluation framework and quantifies farmers’ production resilience using an entropy-weighted composite index constructed from multiple indicators of absorptive, adaptive, and transformative capacities. Based on survey data from 492 farm households in the black soil region of Northeast China, we examine the relationship between conservation tillage adoption and farmers’ production resilience and explore the associated pathways. The baseline model estimates that conservation tillage adoption is associated with a 0.036-unit higher composite production resilience index on a 0–1 scale, with the estimated association statistically significant at the 1% level. This relationship is consistent with pathways involving improved soil production condition, higher farming income, and optimized labor allocation. The estimated association also varies significantly across age groups, technical-training status, and levels of land fragmentation. The results also reveal complementarity between no-tillage or minimum tillage and straw mulching: their combined adoption is associated with higher resilience than adopting either practice alone, particularly at partial or high residue-retention levels. These findings suggest that conservation tillage may contribute not only to soil conservation but also to farmers’ capacity to cope with external shocks in the black soil region of Northeast China. They also highlight the potential importance of promoting integrated conservation tillage technology packages and improving the intensity and quality of conservation tillage adoption in this region.