Rebuilding rural community cooperative institutions and their role in herder adaptation to climate change

Many studies have emphasized the importance of community-based natural resource management institutions in adapting to climate change and responding to the global shift towards individualized land tenure regimes. However, few have reported on the innovative institutions developed by some rural communities to rebuild community cooperation and rural adaptive capacity. This paper draws on four comparative cases from the Tibetan Plateau to assess how locally developed community cooperative institutions mediate herders’ access to markets and resources to foster adaptive capacity and adaptation in response to snow-related catastrophes. Results demonstrate that community cooperative institutions are more effective in improving adaptive capacity than the market-based adaptation strategies that are the predetermined outcome of individualized tenure regimes. When such cooperative institutions exist, community members are able to apply both household and community collective adaptation strategies, resulting in better livelihood outcomes. Community cooperative institutions effectively address individual needs and priorities by clarifying entitlements and market-based networks. They rebuild community collective action and cooperative business entities that improve herders’ ability to access resources and markets more equally by distributing benefits to all community members. This study concludes that following the establishment of individualized land tenure regimes, rebuilding community cooperation necessitates hybridization of property rights arrangements, reformed institutions, and social networks operating across levels of governance to facilitate interdependent interactions between collective and individual adaptation strategies. Such community cooperation offers new opportunities for improving adaptive capacity in pastoral regions and elsewhere.Market-based institutions and adaptation strategies are significant components of climate adaptation policies in pastoral and agricultural regions, though they face equity and collective action-building challenges.Adaptative capacity should be understood as a function of cross-level interactions among individuals, community organizations, and external stakeholders.These cases of community cooperative institutions offer new insights into coordinating the interactions between individual-level and community-level adaptation practices.Community-based natural resource management (CBNRM) institutions can restore collective management of natural resources and stimulate formal economic cooperation to build bridging networks with other stakeholders; this generates opportunities for all community members to more broadly access resources and markets to improve adaptive capacity.