Emergence of local collective action for land adjustment in land consolidation in China: An archetype analysis

Abstract

Land consolidation (LC) is considered an effective instrument to respond to public demands in rural areas of China due to its evolution from a purely technical policy into a more comprehensive social project. As one of the most important steps in LC, land adjustment has a major impact on its success. Despite the broad heterogeneity of local contexts, land adjustment-related collective action has emerged nationwide as a public good. However, the generalized patterns explaining how and why such examples of local collective action occur remain poorly investigated. This study analyses configurations of the factors that generate land adjustment-related collective action in LC by drawing upon the archetype approach and using a social-ecological systems (SES) framework to conceptually decompose the many details of cases. Based on 34 systematically selected cases from eastern, central, and western China, the results show that there is a set of 23 configurations of factors that bear a causal relationship with collective action in land adjustment. These can be clustered into six archetypes. Some collective action conditions that are well known in the existing literature, such as group size, reciprocity, and trust, are reconfirmed in this analysis. Furthermore, several distinctive implications are drawn from the archetype analysis: 1) Local leadership combined with self-governance convention and institutionalized self-organization or powerful local leadership allied with goal congruence create favorable conditions for the local collective action of self-organized LCPs. 2) Leadership also plays a significant role in facilitating local collective action for land adjustment under government-led and enterprise-led modes as government and enterprises rely on local leadership to avoid the need to contact numerous scattered farmers and to save on transaction costs. 3) While excessive intervention by the government is restrained under self-organized and enterprise-led modes, the archetypes highlight that government participation facilitate local cooperation. 4) The government and enterprises likely engage in rural collective action through divergent mechanisms motivated by their political or economic goals. In general, these findings provide new insights into land-related local collective action and may benefit China and other regions for transition processes towards rural sustainability.