A~B, distribution map of interviewees in the control group (CG) and experimental group (EG); C~F, ecological restoration projects in Tibet; G, conducting household interviews.
The people in the photographs who are interviewing others are members of the survey team, all of whom consented to the use of their photographs in the study.

By Yijia Wang, Yanxu Liu, Xutong Wu, Xinsheng Wang, Ying Yao, Zhiwei Zhang, and Bojie Fu.

Read the full paper here.

As the main part of the “roof of the world”, the Tibet Autonomous Region (referred to as Tibet afterwards) faces the dual challenges of climate and socioeconomic changes.To improve the fragile environment in Tibet, the government has implemented a series of engineering projects to achieve ecological restoration. Ecological restoration is a typical form of adaptive governance implemented in ecologically vulnerable and easily disturbed areas.Whether ecological restoration can achieve long-term effects rather than short-term recovery and whether it can be sustainable rather than stimulate new conflicts depends on a range of stakeholder perceptions and trade-offs about policy and resources (what we call cognitive structure).

To assess the role of ecological restoration in Tibet on the cognitive structure of residents, we widely distributed questionnaires to survey residents’ perceptions of resources and policies. We distributed questionnaires to Tibetan residents, distinguished experimental groups (EG, n=325) and control groups (CG, n =165) by the implementation of ecological restoration projects or not. A network approach was then used to construct indicators for analysing the role of ecological restoration implementation.

Our results showed that EG has a higher income preference and more sources of livelihood. Interviewees who did not experience ecological projects observed more land desertification, wildlife decline, and water erosion around their residences. The implementation of ecological engineering strengthens the cognitive network of residents. We believed that the ecological restoration projects achieved positive impact on the livelihood of the residents. However, the governance of ecological restoration has now reached a new stage, it still faces challenges in how to achieve long-term, sustainable governance, and there is a need to explore more flexible governance approaches that incorporate the actual needs of resource users.