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Paper short abstract

Within Tibetan communities’ entangled historical, political, and cultural context on the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau (QTP), NGOs created a buffer zone for establishing Han-Tibetan consensus on ecological issues.

Paper long abstract

In recent decades, climate change has significantly threatened the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau’s (QTP) ecological stability. Meanwhile, China’s increased engagement in international affairs has shifted its Western Development Campaign towards sustainable development priorities. Furthermore, its claim to consolidate its political leadership legitimacy in the QTP region has led to greater attention being paid to the pollution problems associated with urbanization and the development of the tourism economy in the QTP region. In response, the Chinese government has begun to promote the construction of cultural ecosystem services, including national parks and other ecological protection facilities. This inadvertently coincides with the indigenous Tibetan advocacy of ‘Green Tibetan’ based on their traditional religious beliefs and culture to protect the natural 'sacred lands’, and has received a cooperative response from the Tibetan community.

Considering the complex historical political issues in the QTP Tibetan Autonomous Region and the long-standing concern of internal orientalism in the cultural exchanges between the Han and Tibetan communities, the Han-Tibetan consensus reached in the current QTP ecological conservation discourse deserves in-depth investigation. Through a critical review of the interactions between indigenous Tibetan communities on QTP and Han Chinese environmentalists in the field of ecological conservation and development in the QTP region, this paper argues that local Chinese NGOs, especially grassroots NGOs, have played an important role in re-producing ethnocultural knowledge and integrating consensus on ecological conservation. This paper aims to provide a more nuanced perspective on NGOs’ cooperation function in intercultural ecological conservation.