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should not be incorporated into an institutional setting. What will assist sustainability is
not so much the coercive nature of a feedback system as its focus on deliberately limiting
the amount taken by a few in favor of allowing equitable benefits to the overall group. A
system in which conservation occurs only incidentally (e.g., as a result of technological
limitations) will be more fragile than one in which a group institution exists that delib-
erately mandates priority for future users (vertical axis, Figure 10.1).
Of course, it could be argued that the existing wildlife bureaus at national and provincial
levels already provide these institutions. However, they are not only insufficiently staffed
to provide this function, they exist at far too coarse a geographic scale. For individuals
to be willing to limit personal harvest in deference to other members of the group, that
group must be sufficiently small that individual self-restraint is not viewed as coercion.
At the same time, boundaries must be set within which quotas (or at least general rules
designed to restrict harvest) would apply, and these must be large enough to contain wildlife
populations with some degree of demographic integrity. Thus another step is needed: the
delineation of hunting management units on a geographic scale that corresponds toler-
ably well to both human communities and wildlife populations. Even a rough, imperfect
stab at this will be much better than none at all. Subsistence rights would be restricted
to those living permanently within any given management unit—preferably restricted to
the ethnic groups named as meriting autonomous status.
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Within each of these management units, regulations restricting hunting would be
needed. How would one begin? Not, I would contend, with a superficial-seeming “scien-
tific” determination, as Chinese academics would likely propose (see Chapter 9). There
is no realistic possibility that reliable quantitative estimates of sustainable yield can be
developed for any wildlife population in western China, to say nothing of developing
them separately for a multitude of management units. Rather, hunting restrictions can be
modified after an initial and conservative guess, and by then instituting feedback systems
and gradually increasing harvest levels until a point at which demand is tolerably close to
being satisfied but the biological population is not exhibiting any danger signals of over-
harvest. Nature reserves (or at least their core areas), sacred mountains, areas surrounding
monasteries, and other locally important areas can be closed to all such hunting.
Although conceptually I am discussing a subsistence hunt, participating pastoralists
no longer live in a subsistence economy, and I have already suggested that some sort of
conservation institution would also be needed to monitor and guide the hunt. Thus, it
also makes sense to charge participating hunters a modest fee that would help support
the necessary monitoring and regulation. This would be far different from the outsized
fees charged to foreign hunters; in fact, for the system to work, fees must be consider-
ably lower than the value of the meat obtained. But taxation is a reasonable and neces-
sary component of ensuring that needed oversight is present, and thus that the harvest
enjoyed in the here-and-now is also enjoyed in the there-and-then. One portion of these
funds could support a small and simple operation at the management unit level; another
portion could help support a beefed-up provincial wildlife office that provided technical
and research support.
Finally, an institutional authority—presumably existing at the relatively local level
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