ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Sustain. Food Syst.
Sec. Land, Livelihoods and Food Security
Volume 9 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fsufs.2025.1512088
Analysis of Selectional Preference for Grassland Ecological Compensation Methods under the Perspective of Herder Differentiation
Provisionally accepted
- College of Economics and Management, Inner Mongolia Agricultural University, Hohhot, China
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Exploring herder preferences for grassland ecological compensation methods provides a basis for strengthening the incentive effects of grassland ecological compensation policies. This research utilized survey data from 372 herders from three prefecture-level cities in Inner Mongolia and comprehensively applied grey relational analysis (GRA) and a multinomial logit (MNL) model to empirically analyze herders' selectional preferences for grassland ecological compensation methods and influencing factors from the perspective of herder differentiation. More than two thirds (69.28%) of the herders preferred simple and convenient "financial compensation" in addition to existing forms of compensation; 10.22%, 10.48%, and 11.02% of the herders preferred in-kind compensation, technological compensation, and policy-based compensation, respectively. Compared with individual and livestock operation characteristics, herders' differentiated behavioral attitudes and family characteristics were more strongly associated with their preferences for compensation methods. Compared with direct financial compensation, herders' gender and transport distance to the nearest marketplace significantly influenced the choice of in-kind compensation. Herders' age, livestock numbers, grazing area, and dependence on subsidy and reward policies significantly influenced the choice of technological compensation. Finally, herders' gender, age, number of family laborers, level of part-time income, willingness for professional transformation, and perception of the rationality of compensation types significantly influenced the choice of policy-based compensation. Therefore, to optimize compensation modes for grassland ecological conservation, a "diversified & differentiated" positive incentive system should be constructed according to herders' preferences and differentiated characteristics in order to facilitate voluntary livestock reduction. At the same time, a negative incentive should be incorporated to constrain herders' overgrazing behavior.
Keywords: herder differentiation, ecological compensation methods, Selectional preferences, Grey relational analysis, multinomial logit model herder differentiation, Multinomial logit model
Received: 17 Oct 2024; Accepted: 24 Apr 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Hu, Liu, Zhang and Zhang. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Jianjun Zhang, College of Economics and Management, Inner Mongolia Agricultural University, Hohhot, China
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