Beyond property rights: all roads lead to sustainable grassland management

• The paper explores how property rights shape grassland ecosystem in China. • It uses fsQCA to reveal diverse pathways to grassland sustainability or degradation. • It offers village-level empirical evidence from a nationwide pastoral survey. • Property rights impact grasslands through complex socioecological interactions. • Adaptive governance is crucial for sustainability, especially during natural disasters. The impacts of property rights on the sustainable management of natural resources have long been debated, yet a consensus remains elusive. Empirical observations reveal puzzling inconsistency: as similar property regimes produce varying outcomes, whereas different property regimes can lead to similar results. A key reason for this inconsistency is that previous studies have often overlooked the complex causal relationships between property rights and other social, economic and natural factors affecting natural resource uses. This study focuses on pastoral areas in China and explores how grassland property rights, together with adaptive grassland management strategies, and wider socio-economic factors, jointly shape grassland ecosystems. Using data from 129 villages across four major pastoral provinces, we employed fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) to explore the diverse pathways leading to grassland sustainability or degradation and to investigate the complex causal relationships among the factors. This study offers the first empirical, village-level evidence on how property rights affect grassland quality, drawing on data from a nationwide village survey. The results reveal that the relationship between property rights and grassland quality is shaped by the complex interaction between property rights and the broader socioecological context. Beyond the property rights solution, adaptive management strategies emerges as crucial alternatives for enhancing sustainability of grassland, particularly in the face of climate disaster or in communities with limited grassland resources.