Economic Resilience as a Mediator: Assessing the Impact of China’s Grazing Withdrawal Project on Herders’ Well-Being in the Yellow River Source Region

Investigating how China’s most extensive grassland conservation program, the Grazing Withdrawal Project, impacts herders’ resilience and welfare levels is crucial for promoting sustainable grassland protection and enabling herders to withstand external shocks. However, few empirical studies have linked policy measures, economic resilience, and subjective well-being. Based on 266 questionnaires from the Yellow River Source Region, we constructed an indicator system for evaluating economic resilience and employed multiple linear regression to explore the key variables affecting herders’ economic resilience and subjective well-being under the context of the project and to clarify the mediating effect of resilience in translating government interventions into enhanced welfare. The results reveal that households in the Yellow River Source Region were characterized by “low economic resilience yet high subjective well-being.” Among the three resilience dimensions, recovery capacity and reorganization capacities were comparatively weak. Economic resilience had a significant positive impact on herders’ well-being, partially mediating the relationship between policy variables and subjective well-being. Compared with other policy measures, subsidy adequacy and emergency support remained the primary drivers of subjective well-being. Future policy should innovate a diversified subsidy regime that maintains herders’ subjective well-being while making up for the shortcomings of reorganization capacity, thereby securing the sustainability of livelihoods alongside ecological conservation.