Collective action in implementing top-down land policy: The case of Chengdu, China

Abstract

Rapid urbanization in China has led to the increasing scarcity of land suitable and available for construction. Concurrently, rural depopulation has resulted in many vacant properties, including farmhouses and buildings. In order to address this issue, a national land transfer policy has been implemented since the early 2000s in which vacant rural properties are returned to agriculture in return for similar areas of periurban land being released for construction. While there have been many different approaches to policy implementation, most commentators agree that successful schemes are characterized by the involvement of local people. As yet, however, there has been little research into how such local collective action is organized, and whether it is really possible to address top-down policies through local, bottom-up, action. Based on a case study of the earliest pilot program in Chengdu, Sichuan Province, we seek to demonstrate that the top-down nature of China's land transfer policy does not mean that it is necessarily best implemented in a top-down manner. Indeed, we suggest that effective collective action is crucial to the realization of such policies. In particular, the case study indicates that with the empowerment of villagers to participate in the policy process it is possible to achieve a broad consensus on the best approach to addressing the problems, with community interests protected and properly monitoring. In offering a new way of understanding collective action, we conclude that even in cases where a top-down approach is imposed, communities can be empowered to act collectively in implementing the policy from the bottom-up.

Does Culture Affect Farmer Willingness to Transfer Rural Land? Evidence from Southern Fujian, China

“…In China's rural areas, the use rights of land are granted to individual households while the ownership remains "collective" at the village level, and this is called the household responsibility system [3]. Land transfer requires government support and policy, but it ultimately depends on farmer decision-making [4,5]. The decision-making of farmers reflects their consideration of the benefits and risks before and after land transfers of any form [6].…”

Responsibility-driven collective action in the context of rapid rural depopulation

“…Community-based collective action, when organized effectively, has been proven to be successful in dealing with the management of rural public goods, or common pool resources (Ostrom, 1990;Agrawal, 2001;Saunders et al, 2014). Examples include the sustainable management of collective forests , construction and maintenance of irrigation systems (Takayama et al, 2018), and optimization of collective construction land (Liu and Ravenscroft, 2017). Such findings are consistent with the history of rural governance in many countries.…”

“…Rural degradation in the process of urbanization is a global trend, and the failure of local governments to maintain public goods, such as environmental pollution treatment, waste disposal and village landscape maintenance, is a direct and obvious challenge (Liu and Li, 2017). However, evidence suggests that collective action in these cases rarely happens, even in areas where the community had previously provided their own village-level public goods (Liu and Ravenscroft, 2017). Both benefits and costs are nonexclusive, which leads to the situation that the costs of non-action are shared (i.e.…”

“…It also became clear that they maintained a strong feeling for their native village and had less concern for personal economic gains. Such a phenomenon has been identified in many rural areas in China (Liu and Ravenscroft, 2017), where reputable elders (usually Party members) have prestige or ' standing' in the village, and are thus capable of bridging different social groups to provide a platform for all kinds of negotiations and compromise. These elders are usually familiar with inherited local knowledges and social networks, allowing them the agency to use these knowledges in undertaking their functions.…”

Multi-party game and simulation in the withdrawal of rural homestead: evidence from China

“…China's rural population has declined by 274.24 million people, while the area of rural homesteads increased by 274 million hectares between 1996 and 2017 (Figure 1). Often, peasants do not demolish their old houses when building new ones (Liu and Ravenscroft, 2017). Thus, many homesteads have become oversized, leading to the continuous enlargement of rural settlement areas (Liu et al , 2017), the mismanagement of rural land (Qu et al , 2019), and the occupation of vast sections of otherwise arable land (Liu et al , 2014a, b).…”