Effects of farmland use rights transfer on collective action in the commons: Evidence from rural China

Abstract

Although many studies have focused on the negative effects of the outflow of rural labor and insufficient land endowments on collective action related to irrigation, few have considered the effects of the farmland reallocation that accompanies this labor out-migration, especially at the household level. Using data from China, this paper sheds new lights on the internal structure of irrigation collective action by exploring the differentiation of famers’ participation in collective action among farms, especially we explore how the reallocation of farmland affects the probability of successful collective action related to irrigation and how this effect varies among farms with different farmland use rights transfer behavior. Employing a two-stage approach, we deal with endogeneity problems and examine the effect from the perspective of behavior variation among small farms, based on survey data from 4917 households in 21 provinces in China. We find that the effect varies according to the type of transfer behavior. In particular, farmland transfer makes farmers who are expanding their production, and also farmers who are optimizing their land utilization, more likely to participate in collective action for irrigation, but the effect on farmers who are downsizing their agricultural production is not significant. Thus, farmland transfer influences the success of village collective action curvilinearly, and mainly through transfer-in and farm-adjustment farmers’ decision to participate in collective action. Implications are drawn for land use policy as well as the governance of commons.