Household Functions and Their Transformation in Grassland Ecological Governance: Evidence from Pastoral Areas in Inner Mongolia

Grassland ecological governance is a systematic project integrating natural and social attributes, involving pastoral social structure adjustment and herders’ livelihood transformation. Pastoral households are the basic production units and direct ecological responsibility bearers in Inner Mongolia. Based on 2001–2023 statistical data and 2014–2023 field surveys, this study adopts an integrated mixed-methods approach: quantitative trend analysis is used to identify long-term changes in household number and size, while qualitative thematic coding of interviews and participatory observation is applied to interpret behavioral logic and governance mechanisms, so as to achieve mutual verification and complementarity between the two data types. We find that pastoral household numbers grew rapidly after 2010 and remained high. By 2023, the number reached 641,500, with average household size dropping to 2.89 people. Driven by ecological subsidy policies, grassland tenure confirmation, and livestock market returns, household scale shrank and grassland was fragmented. The three spontaneously formed ecological governance functions—population regulation, grass-livestock balance, and human-land adjustment—have weakened and shifted from “spontaneous governance” to “passive response.” Herder differentiation in this paper refers to the stratification of pastoral households into distinct groups in terms of livestock scale, grassland area, livelihood structure, and governance capacity, forming heterogeneous behavioral patterns and policy responses. Future governance should abandon the one-sided label of herders as “ecological destroyers,” improve differentiated subsidy policies, and support joint household governance to revitalize endogenous governance capacity.