China's forest tenure reform and institutional change at a crossroads

Published Date
November 2016, Vol.72:92–98, doi:10.1016/j.forpol.2016.06.019
New Frontiers of Forest Economics: Forest Economics beyond the Perfectly Competitive Commodity Markets

Author 

• Ping Liu ^a,
 
• Runsheng Yin ^b,c,
 
• Hua Li ^b,,

• aCollege of Management, Tianjin Normal University, Tianjin 300387, China
• bCollege of Economics and Management, Northwest A&F University, Yangling 712100, China
• cDepartment of Forestry, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI 48824, USA

Received 21 June 2015. Revised 4 January 2016. Accepted 26 March 2016. Available online 28 June 2016.

Highlights

• China has encountered challenges in reforming and restructuring its rural forestry.
• •
  Harvest restrictions must be relaxed to improve the forest management incentive.
• •
  Parcelization of forestland and a rush to form forest co-ops need to be dealt with.
• •
  Boundary disputes and conflicting claims should be carefully resolved.
• •
  Rules of classified management and ecosystem service compensation ought to be adjusted.

Abstract 

China's latest rural forest reforms have made headway by further devolving the use rights of collectively owned forestland and relaxing government control over private forestry operations. However, there have been policy inconsistencies, conflicts, and even maladaptions such as harvest restrictions, taking of devolved forestland without fair compensation, lack of flexibility in local execution, and a rush to forming co-ops. Building on recent research advances, this paper attempts to further elucidate practical solutions to these challenges. The authors argue that the stake is high to address these challenges in a timely manner, and that effective and coherent resolutions to them are urgently needed. To that end, it is essential to better understand the institutional economics in regard to property rights, collective action, transaction costs, and governance, and to better understand the primary features of forest ecosystems and forestry as well as the rural society of China. It is hoped that this effort will contribute to the continued discussion and more effective implementation of the forest devolution and institutional transition in China and elsewhere.

Keywords

Devolution

Tenure

Land use rights

Governance

Transaction cost

Collective action

Ecosystem services

---

 Table 1

Table 1.

 Table 2

Table 2.

• ☆
  This article is part of a special section entitled “New Frontiers of Forest Economics: Forest Economics beyond the Perfectly Competitive Commodity Markets”, published in the journal Forest Policy and Economics 72, 2016.

• ⁎ 
  Corresponding author.

For further details log on website :
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305750X05001002