Climate adaptation and institutional continuity: Understanding lock-in dynamics in China's grassland governance

Abstract

Intensifying climate change poses growing challenges for socio-economic stability and rural livelihoods in China, particularly in ecologically sensitive regions such as the Inner Mongolian grasslands. Although climate adaptation has become a key policy priority, translating national objectives into locally effective action remains complex. A central challenge lies in the emergence of adaptation lock-ins—self-reinforcing institutional, epistemological, and policy dynamics that stabilize specific adaptation pathways while limiting alternative responses. This study applies the adaptive lock-in framework to examine how such dynamics have developed within China's grassland governance and how they shape climate vulnerability and adaptive capacity over time. Focusing on interactions among political–economic structures, centralized decision-making, and subnational implementation, the analysis explores how adaptation goals become institutionalized through formal policies, administrative procedures, and dominant knowledge frameworks. The study draws on 207 in-depth interviews with pastoralists, village cadres, and local officials in Inner Mongolia, complemented by a systematic review of climate adaptation and grassland management policy documents issued between 2002 and 2024. The findings suggest that adaptation lock-ins are closely intertwined with broader development and conservation agendas that influence infrastructure investment, risk framing, and institutional practice. While these arrangements facilitate policy coordination and implementation, they may also constrain flexibility in addressing diverse local conditions. By elucidating the mechanisms through which adaptation lock-ins form and persist, this study offers policy-relevant insights into how future climate adaptation efforts might strengthen responsiveness and resilience within existing governance frameworks, with implications extending beyond the Chinese context.

Introduction

Intensifying climate change presents a growing threat to China's socio-economic stability, environmental security, and rural livelihoods, particularly in ecologically fragile regions such as the grasslands of Inner Mongolia. Between 2004 and 2022, China experienced a marked rise in annual economic losses from extreme weather events, reaching 310.5 billion RMB (China Meteorological Administration, 2021, 2023). Grasslands, which cover over 40% of China's land area, are ecologically sensitive and vital to the livelihoods of over 35 million pastoralists. However, they are undergoing acute degradation due to climate change, overgrazing, land conversion, and policy-driven shifts in land management. Changing precipitation and temperature regimes have reduced biomass, altered grassland composition, and undermined ecosystem services (Pan et al., 2015). Inner Mongolia's grasslands, comprising 22% of China's total grassland area and 74% of the region's land, are central to national adaptation goals. Yet 51.5% of Inner Mongolia's land is already classified as desertified, exacerbating climate vulnerability (The People's Government of Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, 2021). Effective adaptation is not merely a technical task but also an institutional challenge requiring systemic reforms and inclusive governance to address the structural drivers of vulnerability.

Existing research demonstrates that China's climate adaptation efforts remain inadequate in addressing the scale of climate risks and structural vulnerabilities. Although the central government has prioritized adaptation to safeguard economic development and social stability through binding environmental targets and fiscal transfers, implementation remains fragmented and incremental (Chen and Gong, 2021; Ding et al., 2021). National strategies, such as the updated National Climate Change Adaptation Strategy 2035, emphasize preemptive risk reduction, cross-sectoral integration, regional pilot programs, and the protection of vulnerable populations (MEE, 2022a). However, the limited integration of climate risk assessments into policy planning co-produces a “vulnerability lock-in” through technocratic, top-down approaches that fail to address systemic inequalities (Nadin et al., 2015; Teebken, 2024c). In grassland regions, adaptation strategies such as livestock reduction and fodder storage remain insufficient without broader institutional reform and collective governance (Pan et al., 2015). Incremental responses also overlook the multi-scalar processes by which vulnerability is reproduced (Eriksen et al., 2021; Teebken, 2024b). Moreover, critical gaps remain in understanding how adaptation measures are integrated across governance levels and how adaptation knowledge is translated into policy. Few studies examine why, despite official rhetoric, there has been limited engagement from bottom-up stakeholders in shaping adaptation policy. Further research is needed to explore overlapping path-dependent processes and the role of formal institutions in maintaining, reproducing, or deepening climate vulnerability.

This study draws on the concept of adaptive lock-ins (Groen et al., 2023; Jager et al., 2022; Siebenhüner et al., 2021; Teebken, 2022) to investigate three interrelated questions: (1) How do political-economic structures and centralized decision-making processes interact with climate adaptation policy in China's grassland regions, and in what ways might these dynamics produce interlocking adaptation lock-ins that shape or sustain existing patterns of vulnerability? (2) How are national adaptation objectives interpreted and operationalized through subnational programs, and how do rural development goals and administrative routines influence the framing and implementation of adaptation agendas? (3) In what ways do adaptation lock-ins intersect with various knowledge systems and socio-ecological conditions, and why are certain forms of knowledge about climate impacts and vulnerability privileged in conservation policymaking? Addressing these questions requires analyzing how top-down environmental governance structures reinforce path dependencies in state–society relations and shape rural adaptive capacity. A lock-in perspective offers a robust framework through which to examine the historical, institutional, and political-economic roots of vulnerability in China's grassland governance. It further advances an understanding of the dual role of the state: as a “knowledge apparatus” that constructs and sustains dominant epistemologies of climate policy, and as an implementing actor whose capacities are conditioned by entrenched governance logics, which enables a critical examination of how adaptation policy is embedded within, and simultaneously reinforces, the institutional and ideological foundations of top-down environmental governance.

Climate adaptation, grassland management, and lock-ins

Climate change adaptation is widely recognized as a cross-cutting governance challenge, yet it remains fragmented across sectors, undermining the systemic and interdependent nature of climate risk (Dilling et al., 2015; Lamb and Minx, 2020). Effective adaptation requires a multidimensional understanding of vulnerability, grounded in structural and institutional conditions rather than limited, descriptive indicators (Blythe et al., 2018; Cannon, 2006; Teebken, 2024a). Despite growing recognition of the need for multi-scalar coordination, adaptation efforts are frequently obstructed by fragmented authority, institutional inertia, and uneven local capacity. Structural constraints and localized governance dynamics further limit transformative change (Kehler and Birchall, 2021; Schilling et al., 2018). As Fedele et al. (2020) observe, most adaptation initiatives remain incremental and technocratic, revealing a widening gap between the pace of climate impacts and the adequacy of institutional responses. Without an explicit recognition of adaptation as a contested and political process, such efforts risk being depoliticized and absorbed into technocratic governance models. These models often shift risk onto those least responsible, reinforce power asymmetries, and obscure underlying inequalities, thereby undermining resilience and equity (Atteridge and Remling, 2018; Blythe et al., 2018; Brand and Wissen, 2018; Eriksen et al., 2015).

China faces mounting climate risks that affect critical sectors such as agriculture, water resources, and urban infrastructure. These risks are exacerbated by regional disparities, ecosystem degradation, and pollution, which heighten overall vulnerability (Nadin et al., 2015). As a result, climate adaptation has become a strategic priority to safeguard economic development and ensure social stability (Chen and Gong, 2021; Ding et al., 2021). Institutional efforts began with the establishment of the National Leading Group for Addressing Climate Change in 2007. The National Climate Change Adaptation Strategy released in 2013 emphasized sectoral capacity-building and localized planning, marking a significant governance milestone (Teebken, 2024c; Teng and Wang, 2021). The updated National Climate Change Adaptation Strategy 2035 reaffirmed a focus on preemptive risk reduction, cross-sectoral integration, and the protection of vulnerable populations (MEE, 2022a). China's adaptation model combines centralized planning with localized experimentation. Provincial pilot programs—backed by performance-based fiscal transfers and technological innovations—serve as testbeds for adaptive governance (MEE, 2022a; Nadin et al., 2015; Xinhua, 2022). Yet major constraints persist. Local governments often lack technical expertise and financial autonomy, with 68% of adaptation funding centrally allocated, limiting locally tailored responses (Asian Development Bank (ADB), 2023). Structural features of China's dual governance model, merging bureaucratic management with campaign-style mobilization, undermine environmental policy consistency and long-term planning (Mao et al., 2022; Teng and Wang, 2021). Moreover, adaptation continues to be dominated by technocratic, infrastructure-focused solutions that neglect issues of equity, vulnerability, and public participation (Chen and Gong, 2021; Wang and Lo, 2022).

Nowhere are these tensions more evident than in China's grassland regions. Covering over 3.9 million square kilometers—roughly 40% of the country's landmass—grasslands are crucial to national food security, carbon sequestration, and biodiversity, supporting more than 35 million pastoralists (Nadin et al., 2015). Yet these landscapes face accelerating degradation due to climate change and anthropogenic pressures such as overgrazing, sedentarization, and disrupted land tenure (Dong et al., 2020; Pan et al., 2015). In response, the state has implemented major conservation programs, including the Grassland Law (1985, amended 2002), the Converting Pastures to Grasslands (CPG) policy, and the Grassland Ecological Compensation Policy (GECP), to incentivize stewardship (Pan et al., 2015). However, these top-down interventions often fail to incorporate local knowledge, address structural drivers, or secure pastoralist participation (Mao et al., 2023; Zhang and Fan, 2020; Zhang and Li-Kun, 2018).

In Inner Mongolia, grazing bans have been viewed by some scholars as potentially ecologically ineffective and socially disruptive and have been discussed as indicative of the potential multidimensional constraints that may be embedded in contemporary adaptation strategies (Mao et al., 2021; Wang and Lo, 2022). China's environmental governance is underpinned by static ecological models, such as fixed stocking rates, that fail to reflect dynamic local conditions (Rodenbiker, 2021; Sayre, 2008, 2019). Scientific reductionism and fragmented policy implementation reinforce trade-offs between ecological goals and herder livelihoods, limiting adaptive capacity (Pan et al., 2015; Rodenbiker, 2021; Yeh, 2013). These challenges are exacerbated by shifts in China's food regime. Since the 1980s, economic liberalization and rising meat consumption have led to the industrialization of livestock production, displacing traditional systems and worsening pollution (Mao et al., 2022; Schneider, 2017a). As agrarian landscapes are commodified within global value chains, the “metabolic rift” between ecological reproduction and capitalist production deepens, worsening ecological degradation and rural marginalization (Schneider, 2017b). This contradiction where the state promotes both conservation and industrial intensification reinforces socio-ecological inequalities and constrains effective adaptation. Such systemic challenges foreground the significance of adaptation lock-ins in explaining why climate adaptation efforts often fail to achieve transformative change.

The concept of adaptation lock-ins has become central to explaining why climate adaptation efforts often fail to achieve transformative change. Despite the urgency of systemic shifts, most strategies remain incremental, constrained by historical policy choices, institutional inertia, and entrenched discourses (Patterson et al., 2017; Siebenhüner et al., 2021; Weituschat et al., 2022). Originating in sustainability transitions literature, the lock-in concept developed from critiques of technological path dependency and “carbon lock-in” to include institutional, discursive, infrastructural, and cognitive dimensions (Kates et al., 2012; Seto et al., 2016). Recent work has emphasized how dominant technocratic paradigms marginalize alternative framings of adaptation, reinforcing power asymmetries and narrowing the scope of viable responses (Eriksen et al., 2021; Wise et al., 2014). Siebenhüner et al. (2021) extend the concept of lock-in within adaptation studies to illustrate how governance systems embed self-reinforcing barriers into policy frameworks. These mechanisms, rooted in historical decisions, institutional practices, and normative policy goals, produce path dependency and institutional rigidities that hinder policy innovation, stabilize policy trajectories, and entrench maladaptive outcomes (Groen et al., 2023; Jager et al., 2022; Teebken, 2024b). Lock-ins manifest across multiple domains and are perpetuated through dominant policy narratives, disciplinary silos, sunk-cost infrastructure investments, outdated regulatory frameworks, state-corporate collusion, and actor-level cognitive and power dynamics (Groen et al., 2023; Jager et al., 2022).

Building on this literature, Teebken (2022) develops a multi-scalar framework identifying four interlocking lock-ins: discursive, political-epistemological, infrastructural, and institutional. Discursive lock-ins occur when dominant scientific narratives on climate risks become entrenched and reinforced by expert tools such as climate models and cost-benefit analyses. Political epistemological lock-ins are closely tied to power and knowledge and how knowledge is produced, accessed, and utilized in decision-making (Teebken, 2022). Dominant technocratic approaches rely on quantitative measures that limit a full understanding of vulnerability and overlook socio-political factors that perpetuate inequality. Infrastructure lock-ins arise from physical assets, such as roads and power plants, that have long lifespans and require significant investment that impedes adaptation. Institutional lock-ins emerge from rules and norms that restrict the integration of new ideas into policymaking. Policy tools, like cost-benefit analyses, further contribute to institutional lock-ins by shaping problem definitions and limiting solutions (Siebenhüner et al., 2021; Teebken, 2022). While path dependence creates barriers to change, actors can challenge established paths through decisions, networks, and advocacy to create transformative change in climate governance. The multi-scalar lock-in framework offers a constructive and analytically grounded lens for understanding adaptation constraints. While it has been applied primarily in European contexts to explain policy incrementalism that limits more transformative responses across sectors, extending this framework to China offers an opportunity to identify shared governance challenges and to generate practical insights for designing more effective, system-wide adaptation strategies within existing policy processes (Botselier et al., 2025; Jager et al., 2022). In the Global South, this approach contributes to a comparative and policy-relevant understanding of adaptation dynamics.

Critical policy analysis and in-depth interviews: Applications to adaptation lock-ins

Scholars have emphasized the pivotal role of governing institutions, ideological constructs, and epistemological frameworks in shaping climate adaptation policies and environmental governance (Eriksen et al., 2021; Groen et al., 2023; Rodenbiker, 2021, 2023; Teebken, 2022). To investigate climate adaptation in China, particularly the GECP in Inner Mongolia, this study employs Critical Policy Analysis (CPA) alongside 207 in-depth interviews conducted between 2011 and 2022 with herders and grassroots state agents. This combined methodological approach is particularly well suited to diagnosing the mechanisms and consequences of adaptation lock-ins, which are deeply embedded in discursive constructions, institutional barriers, and implementation constraints. CPA has emerged as a significant alternative to conventional policy analysis frameworks, especially those rooted in rationalist and linear models. It conceptualizes policy as a contested terrain in which meanings are socially constructed and outcomes reflect uneven distributions of power and resources (Bromfield, 2024; Fairclough, 2013). CPA can address complex governance issues characterized by uncertainty, competing interests, and multi-scalar dynamics (Diem et al., 2014; Eriksen et al., 2021; Groen et al., 2023; Yanow, 2000). CPA uncovers how policy narratives shape power relations and institutional behavior, examining adaptation not as a neutral technical intervention but as a deeply political process embedded within broader ideological and structural contexts (Atteridge and Remling, 2018; Eriksen et al., 2015). These analytical tools allow CPA to interrogate dominant adaptation discourses, which often depoliticize the structural causes of vulnerability while reinforcing elite interests (Bromfield, 2024; Diem et al., 2014).

To complement CPA, this study incorporates in-depth interviews to capture bottom-up perspectives often absent from official policy texts. These interviews provide rich, context-specific data on how policies are interpreted, adapted, or resisted by actors embedded within institutional systems. Such narratives are critical for understanding how lock-ins operate in practice, revealing the subjective interpretations and coping strategies that conventional analyses frequently overlook (Le Dang et al., 2014). Interviews also shed light on how bureaucrats may reformulate policy objectives to align with institutional incentives and how herders experience, negotiate, or resist externally imposed conservation mandates (Otto-Banaszak et al., 2011).

Together, CPA and in-depth interviews offer a comprehensive analytical toolkit for diagnosing and interpreting climate adaptation lock-ins. CPA enables the interrogation of structural, institutional, and discursive practices that stabilize maladaptive policy regimes, while in-depth interviews illuminate the lived experiences and agency of actors navigating these constraints. By combining CPA's structural critique with the grounded insights derived from field-based interviews, this study helps explain why adaptation policies such as the GECP often remain locked into top-down, fragmented trajectories despite growing evidence of their environmental and social shortcomings. Although recent advancements in climate adaptation research have employed Historical Materialist Policy Analysis (HMPA) to explore class dynamics and institutional contradictions (Brand et al., 2022; Schneider et al., 2023; Teebken, 2024c), this study focuses exclusively on CPA and in-depth interviews. HMPA's emphasis on class-based coalitions and institutional negotiations and compromises exceeds the scope of the present empirical data but presents a valuable direction for future research.

Data

We conducted 207 in-depth interviews with pastoralists, village cadres, and banner-level husbandry officials across the Chifeng, Hulunbuir, and Xilingol grasslands during multiple field visits between 2011 and 2022. All interviews were conducted with informed consent and recorded for subsequent analysis. A snowball sampling strategy was employed to capture diverse perspectives from stakeholders in pastoral communities directly affected by the implementation of the GECP. This bottom-up approach enriched our analysis by offering a nuanced understanding of policy implementation that complemented the official rationales articulated in planning documents and state media reports. Interviews were conducted in the informants’ homes and transcribed for detailed analysis. The interview data were triangulated with policy planning documents, government reports, news media, and fieldwork observation notes. One of the authors maintained regular communication with twelve key informants to trace evolving perspectives on grassland management policies and to verify the accuracy and representativeness of the study's interpretations.

Our CPA drew on publicly available documents related to climate adaptation at national, provincial, and sub-provincial levels from 2002 to 2024 (see Supplementary Material). At the national level, we analyzed policy documents where climate adaptation was either explicitly mentioned or implicitly central. The objective was to identify prevailing adaptation discourses and assess their coherence across governance levels and among policy domains associated with grassland management and climate adaptation. At the provincial and sub-provincial levels, we focused on adaptation strategies and grassland management policies in Alxa, Ordos, and Xilingol. Special attention was paid to the implementation of localized GECP programs, which include ecological zoning, grazing bans, eco-migration initiatives, land restoration and greening efforts, desertification prevention, grassland tenure reform, eco-tourism development, and the promotion of standardized intensive livestock systems. We assessed whether and how these initiatives aligned with the broader objectives of China's central climate adaptation strategy in grassland regions—enhancing ecological resilience in vulnerable areas, strengthening carbon sinks, safeguarding ecological security, and improving national preparedness for climate-related disasters.

Analytical schemes

The semi-structured in-depth interviews explored key themes including grassland tenure reform, water resource use, the perceived impacts of climate change, and the costs and benefits of adaptation policies on livestock management. Interviews also addressed pastoralists’ strategies for coping with climate variability and disasters, changes in cooperative practices, the effects of fencing policies, community–state relations, and the impacts of Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) on livelihoods and perceptions. These data reflect how pastoralists and grassroots cadres have adapted to conservation and climate adaptation programs over time, as well as the informal strategies cadres deploy to enforce policy compliance. The longitudinal nature of the interviews provides a comprehensive view of how adaptation policies have reshaped herding practices, social relations, and human–nature interactions in Inner Mongolia's grasslands. The interview data also help identify current adaptation gaps, which inform our analysis of policy documents to trace direct mechanistic links and sustaining dynamics of adaptive lock-ins. In other words, the interviews not only triangulate the lock-in patterns observed in policy texts but also uncover the mechanisms connecting causes and effects through CPA—establishing what Groen et al. (2023) describe as “causal fingerprints” in revealing maladaptive practices in climate adaptation policy.

Our analysis of policy documents focused on (1) climate adaptation laws, action plans, and implementation guidelines at national, provincial, and sub-provincial levels, and (2) the intersections of climate adaptation, mitigation, grassland management, and natural resource governance. This enabled us to trace how climate adaptation and land-use strategies are framed and intended to be implemented. We paid close attention to inconsistencies between rhetorical commitments in policy texts and on-the-ground realities, especially where definitions of climate adaptation and priorities for implementation diverged. These discrepancies were examined at the provincial level and within the GECP framework, which functions as the de facto adaptation regime for grassland governance in Inner Mongolia.

To interrogate further the role of the state as a “knowledge apparatus” in climate adaptation policymaking (Rodenbiker, 2021, 2023), we systematically documented values and priorities as expressed in legal texts, regulations, and planning documents. These were then compared with evidence from investigative reports and in-depth interviews to assess the legitimacy and consistency of policy implementation on the local level. During the initial coding phase, we employed a multi-step, reflexive approach guided by four questions: (a) What values and priorities are articulated in the policy documents? (b) How do these documents conceptualize climate adaptation, grassland governance, and the role of the state in intervention programs? (c) In what ways are ecological goals instrumentalized through climate adaptation policies? and (d) What state priorities are privileged or obscured in this framing, and what does this reveal about underlying state interests and the internal logic of policymaking? Based on this inquiry, we developed two core analytical categories: (1) the substantive content of the policy texts and (2) the narrative strategies used to frame the topics. Special attention was given to contradictions across different stages of the local policy implementation. To ensure analytical reflexivity and reliability, the authors cross-checked their coding procedures before translating the analytical summaries into English.

Climate adaptation policy process at the national, provincial, and sub-provincial scales

National climate adaptation policies

Over the past two decades, China has expanded its climate governance from a narrow focus on emissions reduction to a broader agenda centered on ecological security, resource management, and the interdependence of ecosystems and socio-economic systems (Ding et al., 2021; Nadin et al., 2015; Teebken, 2022). Key milestones include the formation of the National Leading Group for Addressing Climate Change in 2007 and the 2013 National Climate Adaptation Strategy, which integrated adaptation into national development through the Five-Year Plans (Nadin et al., 2015; Wang et al., 2018). The release of the Second National Climate Adaptation Strategy (hereafter the 2022 National Climate Adaptation Strategy) in 2022 further advanced these goals, setting a target for national climate resilience by 2035. The plan promotes anticipatory adaptation, technological innovation, and integration across sectors, with attention to vulnerable populations. Climate adaptation has since been embedded in sectoral and spatial planning, aligned with China's macroeconomic objectives (Teebken, 2022, 2024c; Wang et al., 2024). National policies promoting adaptation-related measures, including the circular economy, green finance, and ecological modernization, reflect this strategic shift (State Council of China, 2021a, 2021b, 2021c).

Nevertheless, China's climate adaptation policy remains anchored in a centralized development model that prioritizes top-level design and leverages state administrative apparatuses to drive ecological engineering and socio-economic transformation. This approach is evident in the 14th Five-Year Plan for National Economic and Social Development (hereafter the 14th Five Year Plan) (State Council of China, 2021d), which integrates climate adaptation into national economic restructuring. The State Council has instructed local governments to link ecological restoration with socio-economic transformation, attract private investment, and advance a “comprehensive green transition” through green finance mechanisms (State Council of China, 2024). Adaptation goals are thus embedded within broader state-led economic and environmental governance strategies. The 2022 National Climate Adaptation Strategy—which promotes early warning systems, risk and vulnerability assessments—builds upon earlier initiatives such as digitalized resource monitoring and ecological redlining. These include the 13th Ecological Environmental Protection Plan, the 2017 National Territorial Spatial Plan, and the 2020 Ecological System Restoration Plan, which emphasize documenting and monitoring natural resource assets to support a unified environmental governance platform (NDRC (National Development and Reform Commission) and MNR (Ministry of Natural Recourses), 2020; State Council of China, 2016a, 2017).

This institutional configuration shapes the parameters within which multi-scalar climate governance operates. Existing policy approaches tend to emphasize target-oriented implementation logics that have long informed environmental governance in China, particularly in pursuit of climate adaptation objectives related to ecological conservation and broader economic transition. Although the 2013 and 2022 National Climate Adaptation Strategies and the 2024 climate guideline promote regionally tailored green development, implementation remains limited to replicable pilot programs (State Council of China, 2024). This model applies uniform measures across similarly designated ecological zones, despite their distinct sociocultural contexts, thereby undermining locally appropriate adaptation. The 2013 National Climate Adaptation Strategy aims to restore grasslands and create ecological security zones through grazing bans and the GECP in the Northern Desert Control Belt, Loess Plateau and Sichuan-Yunnan Ecological Barrier, and Qinghai-Tibet Plateau. The 2022 National Climate Adaptation Strategy further emphasizes GECP in climate-vulnerable areas like the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau to establish ecological corridors and integrate grassland management with agriculture, husbandry, and ecotourism (MEE, 2022a; State Council of China, 2013).

In China's grassland regions, climate change adaptation is framed through a uniform approach centered on ecological security and the GECP, with minimal local differentiation in policy tools or implementation models. National adaptation goals remain closely aligned with the GECP, emphasizing technological solutions and relying on legacy ecological engineering tools such as grazing bans, ecological redlines, and PES. National plans position the GECP as a core mechanism for promoting grassland resilience and advancing broader adaptation objectives. GECP goals are often positioned as either prerequisites for or outcomes of other adaptation initiatives, particularly those related to carbon sequestration and ecological monitoring. For instance, vegetation cover targets are embedded within national grassland carbon sequestration frameworks. The 2022 national adaptation plan and the 14th Five-Year Plan call for a comprehensive ecological monitoring and crises warning system to restore ecosystems and boost carbon sinks in forests, grasslands, wetlands, and oceans (MEE, 2022a, 2022b). The 2022 plan specifies GECP as key to achieving national large-scale land greening and improving grassland vegetation coverage for carbon sequestration (MEE, 2022a; NFGA (National Forestry and Grassland Administration), 2019). Enhanced top-down monitoring supports GECP implementation by further strengthening social and environmental oversight. Despite the expanded scope of these policies, implementation procedures remain partly unchanged across regions, and questions of fiscal allocation are sometimes unaddressed. For example, national climate change adaptation plans urge subordinated governments to seek ecological pilot projects, but lack of clarifications on sophisticated fiscal responsibility. The 2019 Forestry and Grassland Adaptation Plan mandates two pilot projects involving shelter belt base and grassland restoration in Shaanxi Ziwuling and Hulunbuir (NFGA (National Forestry and Grassland Administration), 2019), using grazing ban and GECP. Sub-provincial policies assign the extra costs of grazing ban and the GECP implementation to provincial and local governments at a 4:6 ratio despite national subsidies (Ordos Municipal Government, 2011; Xilingol League Administrative Office, 2018a, 2020). By adhering to the existing GECP logic, current adaptation efforts also prioritize the development of a modernized, intensified livestock industry, treating an industrial food regime as a means of enhancing climate resilience. In this model, grassland ecology is reduced to a production input, sidelining alternative approaches and local socio-ecological systems. The 2013 National Climate Adaptation Strategy calls for an adaptive pilot husbandry project in Inner Mongolia, “using policy, economic, and engineering approaches to restore grasslands, support moderate-scale husbandry, build cooperative ranches, and improve pastoral infrastructure” (State Council of China, 2013: special column 7, para. 2, 3). The 2022 National Climate Adaptation Strategy further proposes “transforming husbandry production mode” and creating a socio-economic system integrating ecological agriculture, husbandry, and tourism to restore grasslands, reduce climate vulnerability, and promote local development (MEE, 2022a: 27, 44).

The state's emphasis on technocratic, engineering-oriented forms of “scientific adaptation” reinforces its capacity to define climate risks and vulnerabilities, while shaping how cumulative vulnerabilities associated with earlier state-led development and conservation efforts are addressed. Following the National Climate Adaptation Strategies, the 14th Five Year Plan emphasizes strengthening vertical ecological monitoring and central oversight of ecosystems through policy and technocratic measurements—big data, statistical early warning and risk assessment tools to achieve adaptation goals (State Council of China, 2021c, 2021d). This approach impedes the effective integration of vulnerability assessments into existing mechanisms such as the GECP and the River Chief System (hezhang), undermining local socio-ecological complexities and the distributive impacts of adaptation measures. Moreover, more sophisticated institutional tools remain underdeveloped, particularly with respect to the allocation of fiscal and administrative responsibilities across governance levels. Within China's governance system, higher-level authorities often delegate implementation responsibilities to lower levels, a practice that can result in limited operational guidance but also allows local governments a degree of discretion to adapt policies to local conditions. In this context, the Ministry of Ecology and Environment's Guidelines for the Preparation of Provincial-Level Climate Change Adaptation Action Plans (MEE, 2022c) provide limited concrete direction on sub-provincial implementation or financing pathways, reflecting both coordination challenges and the broader principle of context-specific policy implementation.

China's national approach to grassland governance remains largely reliant on top-level design and the existing top-down administrative apparatus used to implement earlier conservation programs. Deeply entrenched epistemological and institutional lock-ins—manifested in policy path dependencies and institutional rigidities—continue to promote infrastructure development that supports industrialized husbandry and shape the cognitive frames and political interests of grassland management authorities, in ways that may restrict the scope for more flexible and local context-sensitive responses to climate vulnerability.

Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region climate adaptation plans

China's 2022 National Climate Adaptation Strategy calls for provincial strategies to adopt context-specific approaches that strengthen the resilience of ecological and socio-economic systems. Subnational plans, including Inner Mongolia's 14th Five-Year Plan for Addressing Climate Change (Department of Ecology and Environment of Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, 2021; The People's Government of Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, 2021), reflect these priorities by emphasizing infrastructure development, ecosystem conservation, and disaster response, signaling institutional commitment to multi-level, integrated adaptation planning. Nevertheless, Inner Mongolia's climate adaptation governance aligns more closely with China's top-level design, prioritizing centralized economic and ecological planning over regionally grounded strategies that foster local resilience. Provincial plans reinforce this top-down approach by consistently identifying the GECP as essential for improving ecological conditions and advancing goals such as “grassland ecological security”, a term reiterated across national and provincial climate adaptation and environmental governance policies. Inner Mongolia's adaptation guidelines offer less attention to local implementation or sub-provincial guidance. This disconnect illustrates how development priorities and project-based implementation reproduce epistemological and institutional lock-ins, which perpetuate infrastructure path dependencies and constrain community-based adaptive efforts.

A core challenge in Inner Mongolia is the link between grassland degradation and climate vulnerability. The Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region Implementation Plan for Addressing Climate Change (2010), which preceded the 14th Five-Year Plan for Addressing Climate Change, notes that “average grassland productivity has decreased by 50%–60%, and the usable grassland area has been reduced by approximately 6 million hectares since 1947”, and that “over the past 50 years, natural disasters, particularly droughts, floods, and lightning, have become more severe” (The People's Government of Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, 2010: 2–3). Despite this, it argues that “although agricultural and pastoral production is significantly impacted by climate change, its decreasing share in the overall economy diminishes the effects of climate change on the region's economy” (The People's Government of Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, 2010: 5). Consequently, economic indicators—such as energy output and carbon emissions—are prioritized as proxies for provincial level adaptation success, sidelining concerns regarding climate vulnerability in rural areas.

Although the 14th Five-Year Plan for Addressing Climate Change proposes early warning systems and disaster risk assessments, it focuses primarily on building a provincial administrative apparatus. For example, while lacking details on pastoral communities, the plans (Department of Ecology and Environment of Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, 2021; The People's Government of Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, 2021) focuses on enhancing carbon sink and grassland security using the GECP and high-tech tools, refining agricultural and husbandry zoning, and strengthening biodiversity and ecosystem monitoring. Adaptation policy is also grounded in infrastructure development and the transformation of productive relations, including intensified husbandry. Both the 13th Five-Year Plan for Addressing Climate Change (2017) and 14th Five-Year Plan for Addressing Climate Change emphasize developing infrastructure for scaling-up and, intensive agriculture and husbandry (The People's Government of Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, 2017, 2021). Measures such as upgrading livestock shelters, expanding hay storage, and increasing feed production shift adaptation costs onto pastoralists and may inadvertently heighten their vulnerability. Additionally, provincial strategies exhibit conceptual misunderstandings of adaptation and rely heavily on imposing ecological and social engineering projects. For instance, drought resilience is equated with water infrastructure development, while rotational grazing, livestock enclosure, and ecological migration are framed as strategies to reduce environmental pressure and build resilience.

The adaptive potential of local communities is overlooked in Inner Mongolia's climate governance, which relies heavily on top-level design and macro-level political, financial, and technological transitions. This pattern is evident in both national and regional strategies that emphasize grassland carbon sinks and market-based restoration mechanisms. The Chinese central government has promoted carbon sequestration and trading to support grassland restoration and climate adaptation, introducing legal frameworks and enforcing overgrazing bans to institutionalize these practices (MEE, 2019, 2022b; State Council of China, 2016b). Regionally, Inner Mongolia's 2010 Climate Adaptation Plan advanced carbon sequestration through grassland management and carbon trading. Inner Mongolia's 12th Five-Year Plan for Addressing Climate Change (2014) promoted restoring grasslands and other ecosystems as part of adaptation efforts to control greenhouse gas emissions (The People's Government of Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, 2014). This agenda continued in the 13th Five-Year Plan Addressing Climate Change for Climate Adaptation (The People's Government of Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, 2017), which prioritized carbon sink projects and large-scale infrastructure to address grassland degradation. These efforts were further bolstered by green finance initiatives, including green loans and climate insurance mechanisms to integrate animal husbandry with regional low-carbon development strategies (The People's Government of Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, 2017).

A state-centric eco-developmental model is reflected in provincial policy formulation. Inner Mongolia's provincial leadership group on climate change includes representatives from 26 departments tasked with implementing national strategies, supported by a technical advisory committee of 22 experts from universities, research institutes, and government agencies (The People's Government of Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, 2010). This technocratic structure should integrate more local perspectives or meaningful community engagement in adaptation governance. Furthermore, the provincial plan gives minimal attention to preserving and integrating existing low-carbon practices, such as traditional herding systems. Moreover, the reliance on the GECP's quantitative metrics and “scientific methods” to assess and determine ecological restoration outcomes presents significant blind spots. Such approaches overlook the influence of other critical factors, including the potentially positive role of human activities in promoting ecological restoration. As a result, it does not fully capture the heterogeneity of grassland management practices, the potential contributions of local actors, or the temporal and spatial variability of grassland ecology. For example, Inner Mongolia's 14th Five-Year Plan for Addressing Climate Change prioritizes scientific and technological tools like statistical accounting of greenhouse gas emissions and climate change database to support government policy-making (The People's Government of Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, 2021). Consequently, provincial adaptation objectives remain constrained by entrenched infrastructural and policy legacies of GECP, technocratic discourses, and institutional inertia that collectively inhibit the development of adaptive strategies that are suitable to Inner Mongolia's diverse grassland ecology.

Sub-provincial climate adaptation policies

At the sub-provincial level in Inner Mongolia, climate policies reflect the epistemological dominance of the central government's framing of climate challenges, raising persistent questions about the purpose of adaptation and its intended beneficiaries. For example, Inner Mongolia's 13th Five-Year Plan for Addressing Climate Change outlines strategies for grassland regions, stating: “In desert regions such as the Alxa Plateau and surrounding oases, we will curb desert expansion by implementing protective measures for degraded vegetation and carry out ecological migration” (The People's Government of Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, 2017: sec. 4.4, para. 2). Such measures frequently exacerbate existing vulnerabilities on the grassroots level, as ecological migration and grazing bans disrupt traditional livelihoods and displace climate-related risks to receiving areas (Wang and Lo, 2022; Zhang and Mao, 2024). Moreover, conflicting climate policy goals between central and provincial levels further undermine the development and implementation of locally grounded adaptation strategies. For instance, Alxa League's 14th Five-Year Plan for Addressing Climate Change (Alxa League Administrative Office, 2022) prioritizes emissions reduction and carbon sequestration through pilot initiatives designed to enhance climate governance. While these priorities align with national mitigation targets, they marginalize community-based adaptation, relegating it to a secondary concern. The economic marginalization of the primary sector, particularly pastoralism, combined with short-term political incentives linked to the GECP and renewable energy development, further discourages local governments from pursuing long-term, context-specific adaptation strategies. As a result, such policies may not always support grassland conservation or the resilience of pastoral communities, and in some cases may continue to privilege technocratic approaches over more participatory, community-driven forms of adaptation.

Institutionally, sub-provincial governments in Inner Mongolia face significant challenges in defining regional climate adaptation priorities due to limited funding, a lack of incentives to collect grassroots data, and ambiguous mandates. At the policy level, it remains unclear whether sub-provincial authorities should align strictly with central and autonomous regional objectives or define their own localized adaptation strategies. In practice, sub-provincial policies are subordinated to provincial-level targets. For example, the Alxa League's 14th Five-Year Plan for Addressing Climate Change mandates that by 2025, “the entire region will adhere to the same adaptation goals as the autonomous region” (Alxa League Administrative Office, 2022: sec. 1, 2). This top-down governance model leaves limited room for locally tailored adaptation strategies that reflect regional specificities. Institutional collaboration and accountability further compound these challenges. While the sub-provincial adaptation plan nominally calls for inter-departmental coordination, it simultaneously enforces siloed and sector-specific policy objectives and defaults to restrictive, target-based approaches eminent in GECP. Following the 2013 National Climate Adaptation Strategy, Inner Mongolia's 13th Five-Year Plan for Addressing Climate Change launched a new round of GECP to restore grasslands, increase carbon sinks, and promote land greening (The People's Government of Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, 2017). In practice, the Xilingol and Ordos local governments implemented large-scale grass planting, assessed livestock loads, planned grassland transfers and contracts, and continued the grazing ban to fulfill directives from higher authorities (Ordos Municipal Government, 2018, 2019; Xilingol League Administrative Office, 2018b, 2021). Although central policy discourses emphasize the integration of climate adaptation into a broader green transformation of the socio-economic system, in practice, this vision at the sub-provincial often reduces ecosystems to resource objects for economic development. For instance, both national and provincial adaptation plans promote policies such as seed industry revitalization, dairy industry expansion, and increased meat production to reduce vulnerabilities. The implementation of these policies in Xilingol and Ordos Prefectures and Alxa League nevertheless resulted in the construction of intensive, standardized livestock production that relies heavily on industrial feed supply chains, contradicting the conservation goals that climate adaptation policies are meant to uphold (Ordos Municipal Government, 2018, 2023; Xilingol League Administrative Office, 2017a, 2024).

Our analysis of adaptive policies in sub-provincial government plans reveals that the epistemological dominance of top-down eco-engineering, coupled with institutional inertia rooted in fragmented, project-based governance, has led sub-provincial authorities to adopt large-scale land consolidation and infrastructure investment as key climate adaptation strategies. Supported by provincial GECP funding, these efforts seek to scale up husbandry operations and facilitate ecological migration and are framed as part of broader low-carbon development strategies aligned with national adaptation goals. However, this developmentalist model exacerbates the misalignment between national policy priorities and grassroots adaptation needs. At county and village levels, adaptation efforts are probably reduced to project-based, politically driven interventions with minimal coordination or community ownership. In Ordos and Xilingol, local governments use a case manager system (zhuanren bao’an zhidu) to enforce grazing bans, the GECP, and greening projects, with outcomes integrated into annual government performance assessments (Ordos Municipal Government, 2022: sec. 2, 2023; Xilingol League Administrative Office, 2017b). Failure to complete a task holds the responsible person accountable (Ordos Municipal Government, 2022). Institutional rigidity and the political imperatives of target-based governance have entrenched a risk-monitoring bureaucracy that frames the containment of pastoralist mobility as climate vulnerability reduction. The following case study examines how these dynamics are operationalized in practice, illustrating how adaptive lock-ins at the epistemological, institutional, infrastructural, and actor levels shape Inner Mongolia's grassland management regime.

Climate adaptation lock-ins in the grassland region

Epistemological and discursive lock-ins

Since the 1990s, climate change research in China largely centered on the physical dimensions of water, agriculture, and ecosystems, with a primary focus on vulnerability and adaptation (MEE, 2022a). By contrast, social vulnerability has tended to receive comparatively less attention (Li and Zhang, 2009). In this context, fragmented conceptual frameworks and evaluation models have at times limited the development of more comprehensive vulnerability assessments. This institutional segmentation, which isolates community, livestock, and grassland management, leads to laboratory-derived findings being applied without accounting for systemic complexities, resulting in knowledge lock-ins that hinder effective adaptation.

Globally, grassland management historically adhered to the Clementsian model of vegetation succession, which assumes an equilibrium between vegetation and livestock. Under this model, degradation is attributed to overgrazing, suggesting that vegetation can be managed by adjusting stocking rates (Coughenour, 2004). However, ecologists increasingly dispute this theory, noting its failure to reflect dryland realities, particularly spatial heterogeneity and climatic variability, thereby undermining intervention success (Rodenbiker, 2021; Sayre, 2008, 2019). Despite this shift, China's grassland policies remain anchored in equilibrium theory. Central to this is the concept of “carrying capacity”, which reduces complex ecological dynamics to a single quantitative metric, enabling administrative oversight and simplifying the complex multi-scalar governance of grassland ecosystems (Li and Zhang, 2009; Sayre, 2008). Given the metric's effectiveness in imposing administrative control, the implementation of climate adaptation in grassland regions such as Inner Mongolia continues to rely on legacy ecological engineering tools such as grazing bans, ecological redlines, and PES that favors top-level climate policy designs of over participatory, context-specific approaches. The central government's emphasis on “scientific adaptation” sustains technocratic, engineering-based responses, reinforcing state authority in defining risks and vulnerabilities while marginalizing localized understandings. This hampers the integration of socio-ecological complexity and distributive justice into national grassland management frameworks like the GECP.

In Inner Mongolia, overgrazing is routinely framed as the primary driver of grassland degradation and climate vulnerability, legitimizing state-led interventions focused on livestock reduction, temporal and spatial grazing controls, and herd restructuring (Interviews #96, 158). Conservation policy has coalesced around three principal strategies: (1) carrying capacity or grass-livestock balance management; (2) grazing bans, seasonal grazing restrictions, and pastoralist resettlement; and (3) ecological compensation. While framed as technical solutions, these measures can have broader implications for socio-ecological systems, including reshaping social relations, influencing community settlement patterns, and transforming forms of local ecological knowledge. The privileging of a singular “scientific” metric over context-specific, interdisciplinary approaches leads to the misapplication of ecological concepts and undermines the policy's intended objective of building resilience. Recognizing these dynamics may help inform the design of more socially attuned and resilient interventions.

This reliance on “scientific adaptation” not only sustains technocratic, engineering-centered responses but also establishes a framework through which the state dominates the definition of climate risks, vulnerabilities, and appropriate responses. By embedding state authority within the epistemology of adaptation, this model forecloses insights from local agricultural, forestry, and pastoral practices, disregards adaptive strategies grounded in lived experience and excludes participatory, place-based strategies. As a result, adaptation becomes an instrument of centralized governance over land and community rather than a pathway to bottom-up resilience, thereby reinforcing epistemological and discursive lock-ins that constrain the emergence of more flexible, inclusive, and ecologically attuned responses to climate change.

Infrastructure

Knowledge “lock-ins” have directly contributed to the construction of unsustainable infrastructure and the erosion of historically adaptive herding practices in Inner Mongolia. Central to this issue is the concept of “carrying capacity”, underpinned by assumptions that pastoralists’ self-interest leads to the tragedy of the commons. Consequently, state policy has sought to impose exclusivity and rationalize resource use by restricting free-riding and livestock numbers. This misapplication of ecological theory justified widespread grassland privatization and fencing, which not only increased ecological vulnerability but, ironically, created the very “tragedy of the commons” it sought to prevent (Zhang and Mao, 2024).

Traditional nomadic systems, by contrast, did not rely on fixed boundaries but on flexible, customary norms aligned with ecological variability. Pastoralists adapted mobile grazing to fluctuations in rainfall and forage, sustaining livestock production through long-standing, self-organized institutions (Li and Zhang, 2009). These informal systems facilitated reciprocity among herding households, moderated ecological impacts, and enhanced resilience during extreme weather events (Interview #42). However, changes in property rights and social structures have dismantled these adaptive strategies, disconnecting pastoral practices from ecological realities and exacerbating degradation and climate vulnerability. Privatization began in the 1980s with the dual household-livestock contracting system. This reform dismantled collective communes, distributed livestock to households, and allocated grassland based on livestock numbers and family size (Interview #22). Responsibility for enforcing grazing rights fell to individual households, who were compelled to construct fences. Yet fencing is prohibitively expensive for many: enclosing 10,000 mu can cost up to 80,000 RMB, not including annual maintenance (Interview #36), while the costs associated with fencing vary considerably across households. As a result, different groups experience this requirement in uneven ways, facing distinct challenges and forms of vulnerability in adapting to grazing management policies (Interview #68).

This fragmentation of land and household-level management complicates responses to drought, mobility, and disease control. Herders are now confined to small parcels of contracted land, assuming full responsibility for productivity (Interview #43). This shift has consolidated land use rights, deepened inequalities, and reshaped the social fabric of herding communities. Due to widespread fencing, traditional travel routes have vanished, detours have raised fuel costs, and social ties among herders have frayed (Interview #107). Disputes over grassland allocation have grown, straining even familial relationships (Interviews #2, 37, 51, 60, 126). State initiatives like the CPG and GECP define conservation in opposition to grazing, simplifying restoration to enclosures and bans. However, research from the Alxa desert steppe indicates that while enclosures may generate short-term vegetation gains, longer-term outcomes can be more complex. After three to five years of grazing exclusion, vegetation mortality has been observed, in part because the absence of livestock grazing disrupts plant–soil processes, including pathways through which vegetation facilitates the release of accumulated soil salts, thereby contributing to soil degradation and plant die-off (Zhang and Fan, 2020). Field observations confirm that in post-ban areas, vegetation die-off has occurred due to excess soil salts and crusting—issues mitigated by grazing and trampling in traditional systems. Local herders and ecological monitors note that grazing facilitates soil aeration and salt removal, processes essential to grassland health (Interviews #28, 86, 112).

The move to sedentary, fenced grazing has produced “distributional overgrazing”, as livestock confined to limited areas exert disproportionate pressure on local vegetation (Zhang and Fan, 2020). This spatial rigidity disrupts the ability to synchronize livestock numbers with forage availability, further decoupling pastoral practices from ecological cycles. Two major problems have emerged: the severing of vegetation–livestock feedback loops and the forced shift toward stall-feeding. Due to policies enforcing spring grazing bans, which extend livestock confinement, many herders now rely on purchased fodder to sustain herds as the subsidies provided for bans are far below actual feeding costs. However, few can do so without resorting to irregulated grazing or exhausting their savings. In some cases, years of accumulated savings have been exhausted on feed, only for households to face financial collapse during climate disasters or market fluctuations—weakening community resilience and eroding the capacity of communal pastures to buffer against snow disasters (Interviews #24–28, 127, 163, 192). During increasingly frequent growing-season droughts, herders are compelled to rent pasture at rising costs. These summer droughts are often followed by harsh winters, further forcing herders to procure feed at inflated prices (Interview #176). In the past, reciprocal grazing arrangements allowed herders to relocate livestock during weather shocks without financial cost. Now, fencing and privatization has monetized pasture access and intensified financial stress, trapping pastoralists in an unsustainable cycle of debts (Interviews #21, 34, 51, 60, 93, 101, 142, 167). Poorer households face lower borrowing ceilings and must turn to private lenders, often using land, livestock, or ecological compensation cards as collateral. Many lease out their grazing rights and leave herding entirely, becoming wage laborers in agro-industrial operations. Although the state has promoted financial services in pastoral areas to buffer climate risks (Interviews #2, 120–123, 152–156), the benefits accrue primarily to large-scale herders. These actors enjoy greater production flexibility, access to external feed, and credit that helps delay livestock sales.

However, this financialization introduces two risks. First, access to feed and loans allows wealthier herders to expand herds beyond ecological limits. Second, the combination of high input costs and debt service obligations creates long-term financial precarity. As climate variability intensifies, fluctuating feed prices and market instability make it difficult to recover costs or invest in risk-reduction infrastructure. In Hulunbuir, some middle- and lower-income herders alternate between bank loans and high-interest private credit. In some cases, interest payments erode profits, prevent reinvestment, and increase vulnerability and exposure to future shocks (Interview #97). Thus, while national policy aims to enhance climate resilience through building physical and financial infrastructure, it has often had the opposite effect. Fencing and land fragmentation have undermined the cooperative systems that once enabled adaptive mobility. Debt-driven dependence on feed undermines both ecological and economic resilience. These changes have entrenched institutional practices that undermine climate adaptation and resilience in grasslands.

Institutions

Physical and financial infrastructure lock-ins are central to the Chinese central government's CPG and GECP, both designed to use central government fiscal transfers to restructure productive relations in grassland regions (Mao et al., 2023). These programs mandate that Inner Mongolia's government deploy central funding to reshape rural landscapes, provide job training for former pastoralists, and accelerate the commercialization of livestock production. A core objective is the transition to sedentary livestock management to improve breeds and expand meat and dairy output. This shift involves large-scale investment in infrastructure such as shelters, wells, feedlots, high-yield forage lands, and feed storage facilities (Zhang, 2019).

While intended to clarify use and lease rights and incentivize productivity gains, these policies rely on simplifications of the ecological realities. Inner Mongolia's grasslands, evolved over centuries to function within specific local conditions, are ecologically fragile and have limited, unstable production capacities. The core logic of intensive livestock farming is to reshape grassland ecology through top-down implementation of scientific methods to fit pre-determined policy frameworks. Large-scale transformations—such as the expansion of forage crop cultivation—risk irreversible ecological degradation, including soil erosion and groundwater depletion. Interviews reveal that livestock breed improvement has yielded little success in dryland regions. These efforts typically prioritize a single productivity metric, such as meat yield, which increases demand for feed and labor—resources already scarce in grassland regions (Interviews #43, 26, 145, 167, 189). Industrial feed dependence makes herders vulnerable to disruptions in supply chains, exposing them to significant financial risk. This infrastructural and institutional dependency ties herders to a monopolized food regime and undermines long-term resilience (Li and Zhang, 2009). The misapplication of technical knowledge is also evident in the local government support for unsustainable feed crop cultivation on grasslands, which displaces critical winter pastures. Given the over 200 dormant days in Inner Mongolia's grasslands, stall-feeding is economically unsustainable for most small and medium-sized herders (Li and Zhang, 2009). Intensive livestock systems—requiring continuous external inputs—are fundamentally incompatible with dryland ecology.

The state-led separation of livestock from grasslands has increasingly dismantled historically self-contained socio-ecological systems. Native livestock breeds, co-evolved with local vegetation, have been replaced by high-yield, non-native species, undermining traditional ecological knowledge and adaptive practices. These structural changes have also shaped the design and implementation of the GECP. Initially conceived as a payment for ecosystem services to support climate adaptation, the GECP has effectively become a compensation scheme for herders surrendering land use rights. This shift reduces the cultural and social dimensions of grasslands to a state-defined “ecological value” and narrowly framed economic returns (Mao et al., 2023). As market mechanisms intensified, previously shared ecological resources were commodified. Even products such as sheep manure—critical for maintaining soil fertility—were extracted for market use in the name of ecological conservation and poverty alleviation (Zhang, 2019). Displaced herders often leased their grazing rights to external actors, whose activities remained unregulated under the GECP's household-based enforcement system. This gap deepened inequalities in access to resources and undermined the policy's ecological objectives.

The GECP supplanted the interlocking, adaptive socio-ecological practices of traditional grassland management with a rigid administrative regime. Fiscal transfers now compel local governments to meet standardized ecological quotas, limiting their capacity to respond to diverse environmental conditions or localized emergencies. Policies that promote intensification, herd reduction, and PES have effectively diverted resources from grasslands, encouraging overuse and inefficiencies. These pressures have left herder communities increasingly exposed to water scarcity, food insecurity, and income instability. In response to these systemic challenges, the state has used climate adaptation policies not only as environmental tools but as instruments of societal engineering (Rodenbiker, 2023). In Inner Mongolia, such interventions have been associated with notable changes in traditional social and economic arrangements, producing differentiated outcomes among pastoral households. Under PES-oriented approaches, households with varying herd sizes experience distinct livelihood conditions: those with few or no livestock may maintain relatively stable short-term incomes through a combination of subsidies and off-farm activities, while medium- and large-herd households often navigate higher production costs, greater financial exposure, and market uncertainty. At the same time, some households have transitioned away from pastoralism in pursuit of wage employment, encountering new challenges related to labor insecurity and reduced access to community-based support. Taken together, these patterns suggest that, while achieving notable results, the GECP has interacted with existing social and economic structures to reconfigure vulnerabilities and adaptive capacities in diverse ways. Attending to such differentiation may support ongoing efforts to refine adaptation strategies that are both ecologically effective and socially responsive.

Actors

Within the context of state-led grassland ecological governance, a series of policy measures—including grassland and livestock contracting, grazing bans and seasonal rest, ecological resettlement, and the urbanization of pastoral areas—have been implemented across Inner Mongolia's grasslands. These measures reflect a broader governance transition in which grassland protection has increasingly been coordinated through state-led frameworks, complementing earlier reliance on herders’ experiential management (Bao and Shi, 2020). In Inner Mongolia, interviews indicate that livelihood transitions, including partial or full exits from pastoralism, have emerged through the interaction of climate variability, changing resource management arrangements, and the growing role of ecosystem commodification. Policies promoting more sedentary and intensified forms of husbandry, supported by GECP-related subsidies, have provided pathways for some households to adjust their livelihood strategies, with implications for community organization and socio-ecological relations. From a policy-learning perspective, these dynamics highlight the importance of ongoing institutional adaptation to ensure that grassland governance remains responsive to ecological conditions while accommodating diverse livelihood trajectories. Grazing bans and pasture use restrictions have shaped pastoral incomes, leading to many small and medium-scale herders to exit grassland-based livelihoods. This transition has been worsened by the local state's failure to deliver on promises of stable income, housing, and essential services. Herders have become increasingly dependent on agricultural inputs, privatized services, loans, and wage labor. Policies promoting livestock intensification have expanded leasing markets in which large and medium-scale herders rent additional pastures, while pasture scarcity pushes small-scale herders to lease out their land, deepening financial instability (Interviews #51, 129; Zhang, 2019). The GECP initially provided financial relief by compensating herders per unit of grassland. However, it also accelerated pastoral abandonment. Poorer households, incentivized by grazing bans and ecological restoration projects, migrated to urban areas in search of employment. In conservation zones, herders were required to cease livestock production, with state compensation intended to support relocation. While these transitions have facilitated improved access to certain urban services, they have also generated differentiated adjustment challenges. Some former herders have encountered difficulties in securing stable urban employment, while others remain partially dependent on grassland-based livelihoods, creating hybrid livelihood arrangements that complicate the design and coordination of adaptation support across rural and urban policy domains (Interviews #14, 95, 146).

Historically, pastoral livelihoods were shaped by price–cost pressures and exposure to natural hazards. In recent decades, adaptation challenges have increasingly been associated with ecological degradation, climate variability, and the evolving commercialization of pastoral production. Grassland protection policies and related subsidy programs have restructured production systems and livelihood strategies, generating varied adaptation capacities among herders. The expansion of industrialized husbandry has altered ecological dynamics and financial arrangements, including greater reliance on credit, which can complicate adaptive decision-making under uncertain climatic conditions. At the same time, ecological zoning and changes in collective herding practices have transformed long-standing management arrangements, with implications for pastoral resilience during climate extremes. The GECP's incorporation of grassland ecology into state-managed frameworks has introduced new mechanisms for environmental regulation and compensation, reshaping patterns of mobility, resource use, and livelihood organization. While ecosystem service-oriented interventions seek to address environmental pressures associated with intensified livestock production, interviews suggest that adapting to these new arrangements remains challenging for many herders (Interviews #21, 49, 63, 157).

Cultural dislocation raises survival costs, especially as herders often lack the education and skills needed for non-pastoral employment. In the cases of some younger herders, separated from extended families to access individual subsidies, struggle with small land allotments and inadequate compensation, further exacerbating household instability (Interviews #21, 49). Despite local government efforts, systemic barriers persist. Ecological migrants, especially those from remote areas, struggle to access stable employment or financial services typically available to urban residents (Zhang, 2019). Language and cultural gaps, particularly for older herders, make adaptation difficult. Even those resettled in agricultural development zones have faced displacement, often losing access to both their original grasslands and newly allocated farmland. Some have also lost household registration, forfeiting social protections during disasters. These dynamics have created a growing population of displaced pastoralists drifting between rural and urban areas, disconnected from established social networks (Interviews #42, 129, 167). Many who fail to find urban livelihoods return to grasslands, circumventing grazing bans by renting land or engaging in irregulated grazing (Mao et al., 2021). These practices place additional strain on already degraded ecosystems. Local authorities, often complicit, permit such activities in exchange for the payment of fines, undermining conservation objectives and highlighting the persistent tension between ecological engineering and the socio-economic realities of herder livelihoods. This tension is a critical outcome of intersecting epistemological, discursive, infrastructural, and institutional adaptation lock-ins, which collectively intensify climate vulnerability for pastoral communities by restricting adaptive practices, eroding collective understandings of socio-ecological systems, and entrenching structural barriers to resilience.

Discussion and concluding remarks

The debate on sustainability transitions and adaptive transformations highlights that adaptation is not inherently just and may perpetuate vulnerability and inequality if its distributive dimensions, underlying power structures, and socio-political drivers are overlooked (Atteridge and Remling, 2018; Brand and Wissen, 2018; Eriksen et al., 2015). Approaches grounded in political ecology and institutional analysis, rather than apolitical, technocratic framings, better account for contested authority and institutional lock-ins that shape the critical questions of who drives transformation, what must be changed, and how change unfolds in complex, historically contingent systems (Eriksen et al., 2015; Scoones et al., 2020). Since 2007, China has invested substantial administrative and fiscal resources in comprehensive climate adaptation. While adaptation is not inherently hierarchical, and state interventions may be appropriate in certain contexts (Scoones et al., 2020), approaches must be critically examined within socio-political and ecological contexts. This is especially important in China, where overlap between ecologically fragile and economically marginalized regions intensifies vulnerability (Nadin et al., 2015).

Our analysis suggests that climate adaptation policies in China, particularly in grassland regions, are shaped by enduring epistemological and institutional lock-ins in both policy design and implementation. Although national adaptation plans emphasize regional variation in principle, climate risks and adaptation measures are largely articulated and operationalized through top-level planning and centralized administrative arrangements. These lock-ins are closely associated with the influential role of environmental science in legitimizing large-scale programs such as the GECP, which draw on equilibrium-based analytical frameworks, including the concept of “carrying capacity”, to structure intervention design. While such frameworks support standardization and administrative coordination, they may also simplify complex socio-ecological dynamics by privileging singular, quantifiable indicators. In practice, policy narratives informed by interpretations of the “tragedy of the commons” have underpinned measures such as grassland contracting, grazing bans, and the intensification of livestock production. These measures are intended to address environmental pressures and enhance management efficiency, yet they also reconfigure pastoral institutions, knowledge systems, and production practices, with important implications for community organization and adaptive capacity. Adaptation policies contribute to easily overlooked scale mismatches. Large-scale socio-environmental engineering efforts often conflict with mid-scale ecological interventions and local livelihood strategies. These dynamics are particularly visible in conservation programs, where institutional mandates, research frameworks, and administrative procedures do not always align with the temporal and ecological scales of grassland systems. In some cases, adaptation interventions have reshaped cooperative grazing arrangements and informal institutions that historically supported coordination between grassland use and livestock management, with implications for how pastoralists integrate ecological considerations into economic decision-making. Such changes have contributed to differentiated adaptive capacities across groups. Addressing climate adaptation challenges therefore calls for careful reflection on policy priorities and institutional arrangements, especially within the complex and hierarchical relationships linking central and subnational levels of governance.

Our analysis of climate adaptation goals highlights how policy objectives interact with existing administrative arrangements to shape adaptation lock-ins and implementation pathways. In China's grassland regions, adaptation goals are closely integrated with the GECP, which serves as both a conceptual reference point and a practical mechanism for policy execution. National and provincial plans consistently position the GECP as central to achieving grassland resilience and related objectives, including “grassland ecological security”, a term widely used across environmental governance documents. This alignment reflects a relatively standardized approach to natural resource management, with limited differentiation across regional and local contexts in policy design and implementation. GECP-related objectives are often framed as either enabling conditions for, or anticipated outcomes of, adaptation initiatives, particularly in areas such as carbon sequestration and ecological monitoring. Across administrative levels, adaptation and GECP policy documents employ similar terminology, indicating a strong emphasis on top-level design. While policy frameworks acknowledge the importance of regional variation, implementation procedures and fiscal arrangements tend to remain broadly consistent, and subnational plans frequently rely on the GECP as the primary vehicle for advancing adaptation and conservation objectives. This convergence of policy goals, discursive frameworks, and administrative practices situates climate adaptation within a vertically integrated governance structure that emphasizes coordination across levels and contributes to a particular form of lock-in shaped by prevailing state–society expectations (Groen et al., 2023). As climate risks intensify, central authorities face increasing demands to advance adaptation planning and implementation, often drawing on target-oriented governance approaches to guide policy delivery. While effective in mobilizing administrative action, such approaches may place less emphasis on distributive and recognitional dimensions of adaptation (Mao et al., 2023; Wang and Lo, 2022). Continued reliance on the GECP reinforces state-centric narratives and marginalizes participatory approaches to adaptation. Administratively, institutional knowledge and bureaucratic interests embedded within the PES model perpetuate status quo objectives related to rural development through ecological engineering. This makes local governments co-dependent on infrastructure-led, industrial husbandry as the primary resilience strategy. Policy narratives normalize top-down ecological engineering and systematically exclude rural communities from shaping adaptation agendas. These dynamics illustrate how adaptation goals tethered to legacy programs like the GECP entrench institutional rigidities and sustain multi-scalar lock-ins.

In practice, policy-level lock-ins can give rise to interrelated and co-evolving lock-ins that contribute to scale mismatches within China's predominantly top-down grassland management system. Infrastructure-centered approaches often advance the view that separating human activity from nature can help restore ecological balance, a framing that, in some contexts, may legitimize more forceful implementation strategies and carry unintended socio-economic implications at the local level. A related frame treats climate vulnerability as a rural development problem to be addressed through scientific metrics and technological or infrastructural solutions. This urban-centric approach marginalizes rural communities by treating grasslands as carbon sinks, views social vulnerability as a temporary imbalance addressable through compensation and overlooks ecological variability and community. These frames directly contributed to infrastructural interventions including fencing, which disrupted traditional grazing systems, fragmented pastoral communities, and imposed significant financial burdens. Conservation programs such as the GECP reflect a broader global shift toward ecological modernization in pastoral and livestock systems, a trend discussed in climate adaptation and resilience scholarship across multiple regions (Eriksen et al., 2015; Nori and Scoones, 2019; Scoones et al., 2023). This shift is often associated with the promotion of more intensive production models—reliant on feedlots, animal shelters, and high-yield forage cultivation—as strategies to manage climate risk and stabilize production, increasing global commodity supply chains, and credit-based financial arrangements, thereby reshaping exposure to market volatility and climate-related uncertainty in ways that extend beyond the Chinese context (Nori and Scoones, 2019; Scoones et al., 2023).

The ecological engineering approach, reinforced by infrastructure investments, entrenches a stringent, top-down, project-based governance structure that operates through centralized decision-making. It enforces rigid targets and compensation schemes that prioritize ecological restoration over pastoral livelihoods which have disproportionately affected small-scale herders, compelling many to lease out grasslands or exit herding altogether. The resulting financial instability and increasing reliance on wage labor erode traditional pastoral systems, undermine community cooperation, and alter local understandings of adaptation policy. Rising debt and irregulated grazing further degrade ecosystems while reinforcing the dominant discourse that only state-led, scientifically managed ecological engineering programs—implemented through infrastructure expansion and scaled-up production—can deliver resilience.

Recent developments in lock-in theory suggest that uneven progress in fostering bottom-up resilience can be understood as the outcome of dynamic and self-reinforcing mechanisms embedded within political–economic structures, which are shaped by cumulative policy choices and institutional trajectories observed across diverse governance contexts (Groen et al., 2023; Jager et al., 2022). From this perspective, the lock-in framework offers a useful analytical lens for examining why climate adaptation policies—both in China's grassland governance and in other regions worldwide—have tended to favor incremental rather than transformative outcomes. Once adaptation goals become institutionalized, they are often sustained through centralized decision-making structures and policy instruments that prioritize standardized approaches such as ecological engineering and infrastructure investment. Rather than attributing persistent vulnerability solely to unintended consequences, the lock-in perspective highlights how the framing and operationalization of adaptation goals shape policy pathways, influence the balance between technical and locally grounded responses, and condition the extent to which socio-ecological complexity and local agency are incorporated into adaptation efforts.

The repurposing of the GECP model for climate adaptation reveals how entrenched administrative logics interact with new policy objectives to generate contradictory outcomes. Adaptation goals are often constructed to align with existing eco-development trajectories, reinforcing state-capitalist logics that promote rural transformation through industrialized, large-scale livestock production. At the subnational level, local governments frequently interpret national adaptation as grounds to continue GECP practices, relying on familiar bureaucratic procedures that entrench state-driven ecological modernization as the dominant strategy. As Inner Mongolia's grasslands are further integrated into global food regimes, both natural resources and labor are commodified to support intensified production. Climate risk is increasingly invoked to justify state-initiated interventions, framing adaptation as an instrument to enhance administrative governance over rural areas. In this context, conservation programs like the GECP—though framed as transformative strategies to reduce inequality and vulnerability—operate as forms of “accidental adaptation” (Teebken, 2022), sustaining capital accumulation and environmental control under the guise of resilience and modernization.

This study contributes to the literature on transformative adaptation and lock-ins by critically examining how climate adaptation in China's grassland governance reinforces, rather than reconfigures, existing policy centered on ecological engineering and state-led development. It shows that adaptation lock-ins are not merely the result of passive institutional inertia but are actively sustained through centralized planning, bureaucratic incentives, and long-standing programs like the GECP. National adaptation objectives are absorbed into subnational routines, aligning with eco-development logics rather than enabling structural transformation. Building on insights from transformative adaptation scholarship, the study underscores that adaptation is not value-neutral, emphasizing that meaningful change demands engagement with underlying socio-political dynamics and institutional path dependencies. By extending the lock-in perspective to account for adaptation's role in state territorial governance and capital accumulation, our analysis offers a grounded account of how (mal)adaptation can be unintended, institutionalized and normalized across scales.

In Global South contexts like China, public actors remain central to adaptation, but their capacity to effect change is constrained without broader collaboration. While transformative adaptation requires bottom-up participation, the urgency of climate impacts also demands state leadership to rectify policy shortcomings. Climate adaptation thus presents a strategic opportunity for the state to adopt a more collaborative role—one that promotes institutional flexibility and responsiveness to diverse socio-ecological conditions. Such an approach is essential for fostering long-term resilience and addressing institutional vulnerability, a condition in which institutions manage the symptoms of vulnerability while failing to confront their structural causes, thereby perpetuating both ecological risk and institutional fragility (Teebken, 2022: 242; 2024b).

Supplemental Material

sj-pdf-1-chs-10.1177_2057150X261420583 - Supplemental material for Climate adaptation and institutional continuity: Understanding lock-in dynamics in China's grassland governance

Supplemental material, sj-pdf-1-chs-10.1177_2057150X261420583 for Climate adaptation and institutional continuity: Understanding lock-in dynamics in China's grassland governance by KuoRay Mao and Yue Xu in Chinese Journal of Sociology