Session 1. 26. B.

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.