An empirical study on collaborative grassland governance in Inner Mongolia, China

Abstract Collaborative governance is a promising pattern for grassland governance because the failure of single-subject governance has gradually increased in recent years. To conduct better collaborative governance, it is necessary to specify the roles of the factors that influence grassland collaborative governance. However, there are still few studies that focus on the influencing mechanisms for grassland collaborative governance. To systematically explore the influencing mechanisms, a case study was conducted in 4 banners and counties of Inner Mongolia based on questionnaire surveys and the structural equation model (SEM). The results show that the following three factors all have a positive influence on the collaboration degree (CD): the participation degree of collaborative participants (PDCP), the effectiveness of collaborative leadership (ECL) and the trust degree (TD), and their effects vary. Additionally, TD has a positive mediation effect on the influential paths of PDCP to CD and ECL to CD. Moreover, multigroup analysis shows that both gender and income have significant moderating effects. These findings not only offer a theoretical foundation for the further exploration of the mechanism of collaborative governance but also provide a practical reference for the implementation of collaborative governance in grassland governance and other fields in China and other regions of the world.