Assessing Controversial Desertification Prevention Policies in Ecologically Fragile and Deeply Impoverished Areas: A Case Study of Marginal Parts of the Taklimakan Desert, China

Overgrazing plays an important role in the grassland desertification in global drylands. The effectiveness of policies related to grazing directly affects efforts to combat desertification and sustainable rangeland management. However, there remain questions around how the interplay of grassland desertification and poverty affects the implementation of policies. To reveal the effectiveness of the desertification prevention policy that delineates national key ecological function areas (NKEFAs), the main objective was to perform a sustainability assessment and on-site investigation in Northwest China. A parallel index system, which integrates the indices for economic input–output and material supply–demand to represent sustainability, and the indices for interview records from managers and questionnaires from residents to represent the effectiveness of NKEFA policy, was proposed to comprehensively judge the performance of NKEFA policy, and the underlying causes behind undesirable effects were further analyzed. The results indicate that (1) the performance of desertification control policy is related to socioeconomic conditions—a few counties with increased socioeconomic and land resource sustainability (SLS) are peri-urban or resource-rich; (2) the fact that the socioeconomic benefits of the NKEFA policy are not obvious to impoverished farmers greatly reduces their enthusiasm for preventing desertification; and (3) the livelihood needs and defective ecological compensation force residents with underdeveloped comprehensive quality to overdevelop or use grassland resources even though they have received subsidies for conserving grassland. It is concluded that poverty and grassland desertification interact to influence potential policy performance. Our analysis can help decision makers to formulate desertification control policies with multiple goals to achieve sustainable performance in an economy–ecology system.