Short description 

After the breakdown of cooperative medical schemes and community-financed health care, health issues in rural areas are increasingly becoming an issue of high priority in China and other countries of northern Asia.
This joint study by the universities of Vienna and Shihezi (AR Xinjiang, PR China) 

• assesses health needs of nomadic and semi-nomadic Kazakh pastoralists and the structure and scope of health care delivery in pastoral hospitals through a health status and risk factor survey with quantitative and qualitative methods.
• explores ways to provide better health care in the pastoral hospitals (muye yiyuan) of the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region in China through a case study in a project county populated by Kazakh livestock farmers. 
• develops culture- and geographic-sensitive health scenarios for better health care provision and explores their transferability to other pastoral regions of post-collectivist societies in northeast Asia.
• analyzes and explores forms of governance in rural health care in villages.

The underlying hypothesis of this project is that building rural health care facilities must rely on already present and widely accepted strengths, resources, and problem-solving abilities. For sustainable implementation, necessary is successful integration into existing structures and a certain compatibility with the actual strategies of actors. The chances of creating a sustainable program are greater with this bottom-up approach than with imported solutions designed from outside or from the upper administrative levels (top-down approach). The approach aims at capacity building. Capacity building is defined as the extent to which communities and community members are aware of their core competences and apply them to rural health issues. Using a transdisciplinary and participatory methodology, this joint project will activate new and transform existing resources for coping with and managing sustainable self-organization in pastoral hospitals. These resources will be explored by an interdisciplinary research team using participatory methods. Beginning in a case study of Kazakh livestock farmers in the western part of Xinjiang, the pastoral concept will be tested and evaluated from an interregional perspective.