Roles of Strong and Weak Social Ties in Collaborative Network Formation for Building Livelihood Resilience of Herders: A Case Study on the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau

Abstract

In remote and sparsely populated pastoral areas where formal institution is often insufficiently supplied and slackly enforced, informal peer collaboration provides a critical support for local smallholder farmers to maintain livelihood resilience against uncertain environments. A set of key drivers to the formation of such self-organized collaboration have been identified by the existing literature, but studies that quantitatively investigate the roles of existing institution therein have been rarely seen, presumably because of measurement difficulty. Using household survey data collected from a case village on the Qinghai-Tibetan plateau, we applied network modeling methods to quantitatively examine the effects of preexisting strong and weak social ties on the formation of collaborative network among herders. The results show that the odds of establishing collaborative relationship between a pair of herders with a strong or weak tie was 21.06 or 10.86 times higher than those without, implying that trust and social norms embedded in the strong-tie network effectively reduced collaborative cost and mitigated collaborative risk, whereas novel nonredundant knowledge and resources carried by the weak-tie network facilitated collaboration across boundaries of social groups. Popularity and transitivity were two key endogenous structural relationship development mechanisms, signaling the emergence of Matthew effect and relational clusters. Social status and group affiliation were the key attributes that herders considered in choosing collaborative partners. To enhance livelihood resilience, local policymakers can regularly organize collective activities to reinforce emotional bonds between herders, and proactively engage with broader stakeholders to develop more diverse weak ties. Meanwhile, the leadership of central network actors should be fully mobilized and effectively supervised to facilitate successful collective actions.