Abstract: As the important ecological barrier and main water conservation district in northwest China and even the whole country,grassland in arid areas are not only basic natural resources of regional social and economic conditions but also the core of new silk roads.There are superior natural conditions and channel advantages for development of animal husbandry.But long time overload grazing state combined with insufficient grassland protection investment had resulted in serious grassland degradation.This problem not only affected the production and living of local residents but also seriously hindered the sustainable development of social economy.Since 2000,China implemented a series of grassland construction and protection engineering in pastoral areas,caused a great change of grassland utilization way and traditional production pattern of farmers and herdsmen.As the direct participants of agricultural operation activities and the main body of implementation of grassland ecological protection policy,farmer's cognitive attitudes and behavior choice will directly affect the effect of policy implementation,correspondingly,the policy implementation effect will adversely affect on farmer's own livelihood choice as well as their livelihood interests.Therefore,to carry out investigation and research on the peasant household behavior is particularly important.At present,both of domestic and foreign scholars have done a lot of research on farmers' response about agricultural policies as well as production decision-making activities of peasant household.However,most research analyzed farmers' response to agricultural policy and their management production behavior based on the characteristics of farmers' properties,this kind of research was a little less that through dividing research objects according to different types of grassland protection policy and then to do research about farmers' individual cognitive on grassland protection policy.Therefore,this study took the Sunan County,Gansu Province,china in the upstream region of Heihe River basin as an example,selected three different research region of the continuous grazing,agri-pastoral areas and confinement farming areas as the study area.Analyzed the farmers' attitudes and cognition under differ background of grassland protection policy and their tendency to grassland protection measures using the survey data from the method of Participatory Rural Appraisal.Then,we could provide decision-making references for ecological construction of prairie pastoral areas and regional sustainable development.The results showed that relative loose grassland resources constraints in continuous grazing areas lead to higher cognitive level of farmers to grassland protection policy,The fifty-eight point one percent farmers had higher sense of identity to seasonal grazing and the amount of subsidies,even though,there was still a phenomenon of overgrazing.Farmers of agri-pastoral areas and confinement farming areas had lower cognitive level to grassland protection policy,at the same time,the rising cost of barn feeding breeding led the farmers' lower cognitive level to further aggravate lower.Seventy-one point seven percent of farmers' response to grazing prohibition policy was not good,meanwhile,they generally thought that grazing prohibition subsidy amount was not reasonable.This study suggested that relevant departments could through this aspects of increasing employment opportunities,improving the rural financial service system,refining the grassland award criteria and adjusting the grassland resources constraint to take corresponding measures to achieve the double goal of ecological protection and farmers' income rising.

Key words: grassland ecology, participatory rural appraisal, cognitive attitude, behavior choice, the upstream of Heihe River