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Pastoral societies have developed sophisticated institutions for managing persistent, sustainable social-ecological systems in nonequilibrium environments. These institutions operate at different geographic scales in different years, depending on the climate. This paper generalizes a met hodology for modelling groups of related pastoral institutions as complex adaptive systems. The methodology then draws on hierarchy theory to detect inter-system relationships that are characteristic of social-ecological panarchies. I applied this method ology in southeast Amdo, Tibet (part of western China), an area with highly differentiated cultural and linguistic pastoral institutions. The methodology generated three interdependent models, which I termed "Attentive Maintenance Models" and which each describes complex adaptive systems at a distinct social-ecological scale: livestock herd composition, livestock herd movements, and dairy product flows. Each attentive maintenance model further reveals 1) degrees of freedom for influencing pastoral systems at that scale and 2) which institutions play similar roles to one another in enabling systems at that scale to persist. Historical qualitative data, sourced through semi-structured interviews, supports my theory that completely removing any one type of institution in an attentive maintenance model (e.g. those linked to ecological cycles, stochastic social events, or personal sentiments) precipitates system collapse across all scales. Since attentive maintenance models reveal the degrees of freedom for helping a system adapt as well as which of its types of institutions are most vulnerable for a lack of redundancy, I recommend using this methodology to assess the adaptive capacity, resilience, and vulnerability of pastoral social-ecological systems prior to forecasted types of political and climatic change. This framework reveals opportunities to reinforce resilience, adaptive capacity, sustainability, and risk management in existing pastoral systems through the development of educational resources about pastoral system function and the protection of functionally redundant institutions.