The effects of ethnic sentiment and social differentiation on pastoralists’ willingness to turn out of pasture

The pastures in China's pastoral areas have a "small and scattered" distribution, which results in overloading and overgrazing, ecological degradation, and other problems. These problems have constrained the sustainable development of grassland animal husbandry. Governments at all levels have implemented measures to promote the transfer of pastureland for herders, which has become a meaningful way to optimize the allocation of pastureland resources and improve the ecological environment in the second instance. In order to deeply explore the influence of pasture turn-out on herders' traditional lifestyle and to promote the rational utilization of pastureland in pastoral areas, the study is based on 437 interview data of herders in Inner Mongolia and Xinjiang. It adopts the Binary Logit model to analyze the influence and mechanism of herders' willingness to turn out of pastureland in terms of ethnic sentiment and social differentiation. The results show that (1) Nomadic and mutual aid sentiments significantly and negatively affect herders' willingness to transfer pasture. The stronger the national sentiment, the lower the willingness to transfer pasture and the more cautious the behaviour of transferring pasture. (2) The proportion of pasture income and the proportion of pasture labour significantly and negatively affect the herders' willingness to transfer pasture. Specifically, the increase in herders's family pasture income and the proportion of pasture labour will reduce the willingness to transfer pasture. The conclusion still holds after further robustness checks by introducing instrumental variables, changing the regression model, and replacing the sample size. (3) At the macro level, the government needs to take advantage of the situation and tap the positive role of national sentiment in rural revitalization; at the micro level of herders, it needs to enhance their employability, enrich income channels, stimulate the endogenous dynamics of social differentiation in the development of herders' livelihoods, and realize the effective matching of pasture resources.