Houses for People and Houses for Goats

Abstract

Since 2000, a number of programmes have been implemented in the Tibet Autonomous Region of China aimed at sedentarisation, defined as the spatial and temporal concentration of pastoralists and their livestock. In our case study village in Nagchu, a programme to move pastoralists into concentrated housing failed to sedentarise them. By contrast, a secondary programme component to build subsidised livestock shelters has had a much more pronounced effect on reducing human as well as livestock mobility. We adopt assemblage thinking as a methodology for critical policy analysis to understand how and why this was the case. Whereas no effort was made to undertake the labour needed to create an assemblage of herders living in concentrated housing, multiple contingent processes came together to create an assemblage around the reduction of mobility through the building of houses for goats. These include the biological effects of livestock shelters on goat tolerance to cold stress, as observed by herders, budget constraints in the goat shelter programme, as well as a long-standing village institution of unified livestock movement.