Collaboration for climate adaptation among herders: A social-ecological network analysis of pastoral communities in the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau

Climate change poses mounting challenges to pastoral communities, particularly in remote regions where smallholder herders depend heavily on natural resources yet possess limited adaptive capacity. Collaboration among herders can facilitate climate adaptation, yet the structure of these collaborative ties and the mechanisms that shape them remain poorly understood. Drawing on a social-ecological network (SEN) framework and multilevel exponential random graph models (ML-ERGMs), this study examines collaboration networks among herders in four pastoral communities in the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau. The results reveal that these networks exhibit low density but high centralization, with several cohesive subgroups present within each network. Herders show strong tendency toward affect-based collaboration, transitive collaboration, and collaboration to manage shared grazing patches. In contrast, collaboration based on ecological connectivity and diverse ecological knowledge is relatively limited. The findings also point to the importance of local leadership in shaping collaboration patterns among herders. Overall, this study provides new insights into how social and ecological relationships jointly drive collaboration among pastoral households, and the findings offer policy implications for supporting multi-actor collaboration that may contribute to the resilience of pastoral communities in the context of climate change.