Forests play an important role in the process of land degradation and restoration. As a national key ecological project for protecting natural forest, the natural forest resource protection project was implemented in 17 provinces for nearly 20 years. As the core stakeholders and main force for protecting forest resources, rangers have a clear, more objective and comprehensive perception of the policy process, problems and forest ecological changes than farmers. This study introduces public value theory, builds a performance evaluation system that combines the “process-outcome” of ecological construction and uses the GRA-TOPSIS and obstacle tracking model to investigate the performance and obstacle factor of natural forest resource protection project from rangers’ perspective. GRA-TOPSIS is an optimal sequence technique for ideal solution optimization that combines the gray correlation method. The empirical results showed the overall performance of the natural forest resource protection project is good, the relative gray closeness that indicated the process dimension value of the natural forest resource protection project (NFRPP) is 0.663 which higher than the outcome dimension. It reflected the characterization and value level of overall and dimensions performance of NFRPP in Qilian Mountain. The rangers’ support evaluation is the highest, followed by the ecological outcome, sustainability and stability. The key obstacle is the support of local farmers, the social and economic outcome of the project. The natural forest resource protection project has shortcomings in its management system, function setting and support mechanism and urgently improved it from the resource system, resource unit, management system and user. These results are important to promote better implementation of such ecological projects, to enhance the project stability and the regional sustainable development.

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The Pastureland Rehabilitation Program (PRP) has been implemented for nearly 20 years, and the lives of herders in different regions have been affected to varying degrees. The level of people’s well-being could measure the success of policy. Taking Maduo County as an example, the life satisfaction of 266 Tibetan herders was investigated through a participatory questionnaire survey in July 2021. Multiple linear regression and optimal scale regression were constructed to analyze the impact of the satisfaction of different aspects of life and PRP on life satisfaction, respectively. The results show that the herders in Maduo County had relative high satisfaction in various aspects of life and overall life, and leisure and consumption were important aspects influencing life satisfaction. The relative living standard, the difficulty in borrowing and the quality of government services had a significant positive impact on herders’ life satisfaction. Occupation and migration location also led to the significant differences of life satisfaction. However, the income changes caused by PRP and subsidy levels did not show a significant impact. We discussed the particularity of Maduo County and suggested that more attention should be paid to the improvement of the social environment such as wealth disparity, channels of assistance, working environment, and the effective assistance formulated according to the demands of different groups needs to be optimized continuously, so as to enhance the self-development ability of herders.