UC Berkeley

The Tibetan nomad science of sustainable ecological management is made legible in Western ecological terms by translating its customary practice through the lens of systems science. This creates a framework for collaborative learning about ecology and society across cultures. Tibetan ecological management supports the self-organization of complex adaptive social-ecological systems at ever-larger scales, resulting in sustainable social networks and resilient food systems. In the process, nomads operate using a principle termed herein as “attentive maintenance”—balancing their conceptions of ’dul ba (e.g. taming natural things into cooperative engagement) and rgod po (e.g. the innate characteristics, which should not be lost, of natural things)—to respond to ecological, social, and sentimental cues to action using different practiced types of resource management. Informed by hierarchy theory and panarchy, this study models the Tibetan nomad system of social-ecological management and then points out some critical aspects that are at risk within it. Using the model and interview data, the study traces the causes and cross-scale effects of losing those aspects of resource management and shows the mechanisms by which those losses can additionally reduce system adaptability, sustainability, and resilience.

Two model schema are proposed for modeling coupled social-ecological systems: one of “attentive maintenance models” and one of “panarchical models.” A complete attentive maintenance model illustrates an adaptable pattern of management for a single ecological resource and, importantly, reveals which aspects of the pattern possess sufficient redundancy and which are vulnerable for being singular. A panarchical model shows how management patterns of different ecological resources all contribute in different ways to the sustainability and resilience of the system as a whole. Attentive maintenance models and panarchical models, when used in tandem, are suited to describing hierarchies of complex adaptive social-ecological systems (e.g. sustainable food systems). These include—as demonstrated in this dissertation—pastoral systems in non-equilibrial environments. Attentive maintenance models and panarchical models function on the assumption that the basic robust units of pastoral dynamics are statistical patterns of social-ecological interaction that are reflected, and can be detected, in human actions and speech. In some cases, attentive maintenance models and panarchical models derived from interview data can be assembled faster than models of vegetation community structure change, which might require more longitudinal studies. Attentive maintenance models and panarchical models serve a different purpose than the range condition model, state-and-transition models, or even models for adaptive management: as actionable insights, attentive maintenance models and panarchical models reveal the easiest paths to creating more sustainability, resilience, and adaptability within a system.

For the nomad system in southeast Amdo, Tibet in western China, attentive maintenance models describe three scales of social-ecological resource management: compositions of herds and flocks, well-being of herds and flocks, and household well-being. Each household contributes to maintaining the patterns involved at each of those scales. Patterns that show up earlier in the list create the necessary conditions for patterns that come later in the list to emerge. Attentive maintenance patterns are reflected in the speech patterns and worldviews of nomads’ spoken languages and dialects—for example, the words tshe thar, bsrung, and g.yang in relationship to managing the composition of herds and flocks–that attune them to relevant ecological, social, and sentimental cues and their appropriate range of responses to perpetuate the patterns of resource management. Attentive maintenance patterns are vulnerable to discourses that emphasize productivity or conservation because they skew them toward more rapid or more slow (but not adaptable) types of management. Relationships formed at each scale of resource management contribute to the resilience context of the system, increasing the odds that defunct patterns of resource management can start up again following disturbance. In southeast Amdo, Tibet in western China, flows of dairy products played a primary role in linking animal husbandry to prominent landscape features and monasteries, and nomads drew on those relationships when they needed help.

This research study contributes to discussions about creating social capital, social-ecological networks, resilience, sustainability, and adaptability within ecosystems and social-ecological systems with its case study of how Tibetan nomads accomplished this in one region. It also contributes to Tibetan Studies by clarifying the cultural and ecological utility of rituals involving livestock, travel, and livestock products. It contributes to theoretical ecology and community ecology by demonstrating how statistical regularities emergent from complex interaction patterns in a landscape create and perpetuate multi-level panarchies. It draws on anthropological discussions to contrast the management style it describes—“attentive maintenance”—with that of adaptive management, a preexisting popular framework of ecosystem management. The study advances theories about rangelands and pastoralism by exploring human strategies and cross-scale mechanisms underlying the stability observed—despite abiotic disturbances—in some pastoral societies and ecosystems. It also demonstrates why some extent of land being used in common by different nomad households is necessary for sustaining dairy production and livestock adaptation. Finally, the study informs governance and conservation initiatives by embedding discourses of productivity and conservation into a holistic framework, showing that they help foster adaptability when placed into the triad of productivity, recombination, and conservation. The study demonstrates a new rigorous framework and replicable methodology for developing useful models of coupled social-ecological systems. This can be a resource for pastoralists and other stakeholders as they direct nomad systems’ future adaptations in step with the ongoing changes to their economic and ecological environments.