Property rights; institutional change; pastureland governance; market integration.

Tibetan Plateau; pastoral regions of western China.

Tshering Bande is a PhD candidate in Sociology at Zhejiang University and a visiting graduate student at the Department of Social Anthropology and Cultural Studies, University of Zurich. During his stay at UZH, he is hosted by Prof. Peter Finke.

Tshering’s current project examines institutional change in pastoral societies on the Tibetan Plateau. Drawing on economic sociology and new institutional economics, it asks how state policies, local social organization, resource values, and ecological conditions shape pastureland property-rights arrangements.

Based on fieldwork in Amdo Tibet, the project studies how the household responsibility system—the policy that contracted collective pastureland to individual households—was implemented across different pastoral communities. It asks why similar state policies produced divergent local outcomes.

A related line of research examines pastoral societies’ incorporation into the unified national market. It explores how market standardization may select against local preferences and norms, a mechanism I tentatively call “normative adverse selection.”

Bande, T. (2020). Changing villages and people through the rise and fall of public life: A case in Amdo Tibet. Qinghai-Tibet Plateau Forum, 2020(2).(in Chinese)

Bande, T. (2022). Shared Understandings and Institutional Variation: The Public Pooling of Poverty-Alleviation Funds in Minority Areas. Qinghai-Tibet Plateau Forum, 2022(3). (in Chinese)

Wande, C., & Shi, P. (2026). Interdependent costs and the path to transcendence in pastureland governance: A case study of the grassland household contract system in Henan Mongol Autonomous County, Qinghai. Qinghai Journal of Ethnology, 37(1), 105–115. https://doi.org/10.15899/j.cnki.1005-5681.2026.01.023 (in Chinese)