Session 1. 26. A.

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.