The impacts of property rights on the sustainable management of natural resources has been debated for long, yet no consensus has been reached. Empirical observations reveal puzzling inconsistencies, as similar property regimes produce varying outcomes, whereas different property regimes can lead to similar results. A key reason for this inconsistency is that previous studies have often examined the impacts of property rights from a linear, one-directional approach, overlooking the complex interactions and interplay between property rights and other social, economic and environmental factors in a dynamic social‒ecological system. Thus, this study focuses on pastoral areas in China and explores how grassland property rights, adaptive grassland management strategies, and other biophysical factors jointly shape grassland ecology. Using data from 129 villages across four major pastoral provinces, we employed fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) to explore the diverse pathways leading to grassland sustainability or degradation and to investigate the complex causal relationships among factors. The paper offers the first empirical, village-level evidence on how property rights affect grassland quality, drawing on data from a nationwide village survey. The results reveal that the relationship between property right and grassland quality is not linear; instead, it varies depending on the complex interaction between property rights and broader socio-ecological context. Beyond the property right solution, the adaptive grassland management emerges as a crucial strategy, particularly in enhancing resilience and promoting sustainable grassland use under conditions of climate disaster or in communities where grassland size is limited.
Property rights arrangements play a critical role in resource allocation efficiency. However, previous studies have given limited attention to the impact of family-shared property rights on resource distribution—a form of ownership situated between public and private rights. We explores this issue within the context of China's land contractual management rights system. Using a dataset of 791 rural household surveys from Sichuan, Chongqing, and Hubei provinces, we apply a Logit model to assess how family-based land contractual management rights influence land transfer behavior and examine the moderating effect of household differentiation. Our findings indicate that, in contrast to private ownership, joint family property significantly promotes land transfers, primarily by facilitating land acquisition, thereby expanding the scale of agricultural operations. Additionally, household differentiation weakens the land transfer-promoting effect of joint family ownership within the land contractual management rights system. This research advance the literature on property rights arrangements by highlighting the discrepancy between the efficiency-maximizing theory of private property and the practical realities in China, thereby offering important policy implications for promoting land transfer.
Endogenous development constitutes an important mechanism of rural governance. Long-term practice has shown that rural endogenous development is affected by numerous factors. By studying the case of the village-stationed cadre program in China, this paper presents an analysis on how external leadership rebuilds social capital and improves the capacity for rural collective action, ultimately leading to rural endogenous development. The survey responses of 593 farmers from 80 villages with village-stationed cadres accredited by the central government in China were analyzed. The following conclusions could be drawn: (1) The higher the villagers’ opinion of the first secretary, the better the collective action the village can carry out. Village-stationed cadres can improve the collective action capacity of the village. (2) The social capital built by village-based cadres is the main path that ultimately promotes the improvement of the rural collective action capacity and endogenous development. The most likely reason why village-stationed cadres can realize this improvement of village collective action capacity is that the first secretary forms the kernel of social capital by weaving networks and building norms in the village. By continuously using the social capital developed by the first secretary when forming institutions, villagers contribute to the improvement of the collective action capacity of villages. The conclusions of this paper offer references for rural revitalization in developing countries.
Since the 1980s, the property rights regime of China’s grasslands has been progressively reformed to stimulate the profitability of small farmers and the sustainable use of grasslands. After forty years, the practice of diversified local property rights system arrangements has been developed in the grasslands, with correspondingly different intensities of grassland utilization and livestock productivity. However, most academic and practical examinations have focused on community-owned grasslands, leaving the governance of the state-owned grassland understudied. In this study, an “Institutional Reliability of Natural Resource Governance” framework was developed and used to examine a state-owned farm in northern China as a case study, zooming into the nested “Employee Responsibility System” property right and its consequent impacts on tenure security and social identity, leading to changes in grassland use at both the individual household level and the collective level. Property rights insecurity and users’ identity dilemmas result in feedback of nonexcludability, increased cost, and adverse breeding structure, which jointly lead to environmental deterioration risk. Furthermore, laid-off employees’ collective action on utilizing common pastureland has come to fruition on resource conservation, and we found that elements such as common consensus, social capital, motivated authority, and rules-in-use help shape environmental conservation-oriented collective action. Our study introduces a previously unexplored nested property right regime incorporating an employee responsibility system in a state-owned farm. It emphasizes how property right and social identity jointly shape resource use at collective and individual household levels, ultimately influencing the sustainability of resource use.
Disaster arising from climate change are critical factors that affect rural development. Promoting collective action-based natural resource management in rural areas is crucial for enhancing the resilience of rural social-ecological systems. Land fragmentation is a common land use pattern in underdeveloped regions, and research on the relationship between land fragmentation and collective action has suggested that the impact of land fragmentation on collective action is purely negative. However, past research has disregarded the systemic external shocks that disaster represent, as well as the positive role of land fragmentation in risk prevention and ecological sustainability. Based on survey data from 902 households in the border region of Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, China, restricted cubic spline regression is employed to examine the nonlinear relationship between land fragmentation and farmer collective action under the impact of disaster. The results show that: (1) Under the impact of disaster, the relationship between land fragmentation and collective action exhibits an N-shaped pattern. (2) Factors such as education level, relationships with fellow villagers, whether other villagers are supervised to comply with village regulations and agreements, sense of village belonging, and fertility of family land are also important factors influencing collective action. Among these factors, farmers with a stronger sense of belonging, higher education level, better relationships with fellow villagers, and more fertile family land are more likely to participate in collective action under disaster scenarios. This paper integrates relevant research from both the social and natural sciences. It not only provides new insights into the key factors influencing rural collective action, but also demonstrates the prospects of cross-disciplinary integration between social science and natural science research.
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