Elsevier

Ecological Economics

Volume 174, August 2020, 106629
Ecological Economics

Analysis
Privatization or communalization: A multi-level analysis of changes in forest property regimes in China

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolecon.2020.106629Get rights and content

Highlights

  • China’s collectively-owned forests account for the largest share of the world’s community forests.

  • Chinese government forest tenure reform has primarily focused on privatization of collectively-owned forests.

  • Forest privatization implemented through the tenure reform was much less than what government expected.

  • There is a need to better consider the local perceptions of the tenure reform policy.

Abstract

Over recent decades, the Chinese government has invested heavily in improving the country's forest tenure system through the Collective Forest Tenure Reform. This reform has primarily focused on privatization of collectively-owned forests, which has been perceived to improve effective forest management by providing incentives to farmers. This paper documents results of the Collective Forest Tenure Reform and the factors that have shaped these results through a multi-level analysis: at the national, regional, community and individual levels. It was found forest privatization implemented through the tenure reform was much less than what government expected. Instead, as shown in illustrative case-studies, people intend to retain the forest as common property in a way that creates a complex communal forest management system. The paper argued that while it is good the government is willing to improve forest tenure security for local people, there is a need to better consider the local perceptions of the tenure reform policy's effectiveness and efficiency, and justice in forest management, and to understand the complexity of the pre-existing communal forest management system that exists throughout the country.

Graphical abstract

Changes in forest property regimes across four regions of China.

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Introduction

China's collectively-owned forests account for the largest share of the world's community forests, comprising over 60% of the total community forest resource in Asia and the Pacific (Sikor et al., 2013) and reaching nearly 30% of the resource among the 52 most forested countries in the world (RRI, 2014). These collectively-owned forests comprise about 60% of China's total forest area (State Council, 2008) and contribute significantly to regional and global environmental services and the rural livelihoods of about 600 million households in China (Xu, 2010). Since 2003, the Chinese government has initiated a new round of Collective Forest Tenure Reform to promote tenure devolution, which follows an earlier forest reform from the 1980s. Learning from the success of privatization1 in agricultural and industrial sectors, this reform aimed to provide incentives to farmers for forest management by promoting individual forest holdings through an egalitarian distribution of the collectively-owned forest resource.2 The government believes this privatization of the collective forest resource would improve the forest condition and local livelihoods (c.f. Xu and Hyde, 2019). To ensure the stability and constancy of this forest tenure reform, the central government invested approximately USD 370 million in the boundary delineation, surveying, titling and registration of the new plots since 2008 (Xu et al., 2010). The government also aimed to accomplish its key mission to clarify property rights and allocate at least 80% of the collective forest to individual households by 2013 (State Council, 2008). As such, China's collective forest tenure reform has attracted considerable international attention. Research into this reform would make a significant contribution to global experiences with forest tenure reform and community forestry development (Hyde, 2019).

There is a growing international literature on China's Collective Forest Tenure Reform (CFTR). Much of this research has focused on examining the reform's outcomes in terms of incentivizing local investment in forest management and has concluded there have been positive effects as a result of improved tenure security (Qin et al., 2011; Yi et al., 2014; Qin and Xu, 2013; Xie et al., 2014; Ren et al., 2018; Huang, 2019; Zhou et al., 2018; Lu et al., 2016; Li et al., 2016; He et al., 2015; Liu et al., 2017; Wei and He, 2016). Others have taken a critical perspective to investigate how local conditions may affect the reform, finding the tenure reform has led to conflict between de facto and de jure tenure arrangements (Liu et al., 2016; Luo et al., 2015). Taking a case-study approach at a local level, scholars have also revealed the local variation in governance processes have shaped the implementation of the reform and generated mixed results (e.g. He and Sikor, 2017; Zinda and Zhang, 2018). At a higher level, many others have suggested there are a range of institutional challenges with the reform, including property rights ambiguity (Ho, 2014; He, 2016), top-down implementation (Robbins and Harrell, 2014; Yin et al., 2013), and potential institutional conflicts (Liu et al., 2016; Hyde and Yin, 2019). However, the actual results of privatization in this reform remain unclear in terms of changing areas under different forest property regimes. In particular, there is a lack of understanding of the factors affecting those changes. Thus, new evidence supported by a novel analysis of the forest tenure reform is urgently needed to provide thoughtful insights into China's Collective Forest Tenure Reform.

At a global level, forest tenure reform has been widely implemented to allocate forests to Indigenous people and communities across the world (Yin et al., 2016; Larson and Dahal, 2012; Sikor et al., 2017a; RRI, 2014). While existing literature has evidenced the positive aspects of tenure reform in improving forest condition and local livelihoods (Blackman and Veit, 2018; Robinson et al., 2014, Robinson et al., 2018), research also calls for particular attention to understanding legal pluralisms (Gebara, 2018), customary institutions (Linkow, 2016), local governance (Larson, 2011), forest tenure diversification (He et al., 2014a), and conflict between formal and actual tenure (Sikor, 2006). Taking the analytical framework of forest decentralization, scholars have highlighted that positive effects of devolving forest tenure systems can be limited by a lack of downward accountability mechanisms (Ribot et al., 2006), elite capture (Lund and Saito-Jensen, 2013), institutional constraints (Sahide et al., 2016) and insufficient power transfer (He and Xu, 2017). Among these studies, devolving forest tenure to local communities is a primary focus, while rare attention has been paid to forest devolution through privatization. There is a gap in understandings of the factors affecting the implementation of forest privatization, particularly in the case of China, the country with the largest share of community forests in the world. To fill the gap, there is a need to obtain thoughtful insights into forest tenure reform by combining large-scale analysis with local case-studies. Doing so in a way that combines qualitative and quantitative approaches would provide additional evidence-based knowledge to the international literature.

Unlike the existing literature, this study examines the results of CFTR via a multi-level analysis conducted at the national, regional, community and individual levels. This multi-level analysis enables a comprehensive understanding of the connectivity of the social-ecological system, as what happens at one level can affect the result at another level (Young, 2006; Ostrom et al., 2007; Brondizio et al., 2009). As such, the research aims to answer two key questions: 1) What is the actual result of privatization through the CFTR at the national and regional levels?, and 2) what factors affected the tenure reform result, in terms of learning from empirically-grounded analysis at the village and individual household levels? Thus, the central contribution of this research is to provide thoughtful insights into those two questions as additions to the existing literature. The research also makes an empirical contribution to the policy debate on forest devolution and provides timely information to Chinese policymakers for improving the current CFTR policy. The policy implications are also globally relevant.

Section snippets

China's Collective Forest Tenure Reform (CFTR): a historical overview

China's collective forests emerged in the 1950s alongside the establishment of the People's Republic of China, when the government transferred individually-managed forestland to collective management under the communist system (Liu, 2001; Miao and White, 2004). Within the commune system, village cooperatives were established as the forestland holders, and farmers enrolled as cooperative members to secure their access to farmland and forestland (Grinspoon, 2002). This collectivization policy

Methodology

This research applied a multi-level analysis to examine the outcomes of CFTR, focusing on the changes in property regimes and the local dynamics that have shaped those changes. A combination of qualitative and quantitative methods was applied to generate a robust dataset for providing empirically-grounded and evidence-based results. To achieve this, different methods of data collection were applied at different levels to obtain rich insights into the tenure reform from different perspectives.

National-level analysis

There were significant changes to China's forest property regimes alongside the country's market liberalization process (Hyde et al., 2003). While private forests firstly emerged in the country in late 1980s through the Responsibility Forest (zherenshan) and Private Freehold Mountain (ziliushan) systems to provide management incentives for farmers, the most remarkable change occurred with the pilot forest tenure reform in late 2003 before becoming more nationally widespread in 2008. Table 2

Discussion and conclusions

The Chinese government has made a substantial investment in improving its forest tenure system via a privatization approach to increase the allocation of individual holdings from the collectively-owned forest resource. While the government believes this reform can improve the local incentive for forest management through an equal distribution of the collective forest resource, the on-ground results appear very different to the government's intention. Differing from existing literature, this

Declaration of competing interest

We confirm no part of this paper has published or submitted elsewhere and no conflict of interest exits in the submission of this manuscript.

Acknowledgements

This research financially benefited from Ministry of Education of China (Project No. 16JJD850015) and an ESRC-funded research project (no. ES/K005812/1). We acknowledge three anonymous reviewers for constructive comments on an earlier version of the paper and the English editing assistance from Dr. John Meadows. JH acknowledged funding from Center for Southeast Asian Studies, Kyoto University for visiting professorship.

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