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The Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in China's far northwest includes extensive rangelands used by ethnic Kazakhs. The breakup of the commune system and privatization of leasehold title in the 1980's has only recently been followed by government-led economic development and settlement schemes. Land privatization and settlement of herders has been implicated in grassland degradation and livelihood conversion in other areas of China, but early outcomes among Kazakh herders have been little studied. This talk will present the findings of early-stage interview-based research conducted with ethnic Kazakh pastoralists in the Ili Valley, close to the Kazakhstan border. We conducted semi-structured interviews with 65 households in three designated pastoral villages in Nileke County, Ili Prefecture, in order to learn how development projects have affected Kazakh pastoral communities. In two villages, households have received private leasehold rights to their three seasonal pastures, while the third village allotted its three seasonal pastures to groups of seven-to-ten households for group management. Despite a history of collective management, conflicts over pastures in all three villages were common and interviewees complained of lack of resolution mechanisms, preferring government intervention to other forms. Livestock constituted the dominant income source among interviewees, even among those households without pastures. Partly due to snowfall and partly to recent settlement schemes, purchased fodder is crucial for getting most livestock through the winter and fodder is the single largest annual expense for most households. Nearly all interviewees agreed that pastures were significantly degraded and that there was little future in raising livestock. The best future for children was seen as post-secondary education and non-livestock employment, mostly in cities.