How communities restructured forest tenure throughout the top-down devolution reform: Using the case of Fujian, China

Abstract

China’s new wave of collective forest tenure reform since 2003 (post-2003 reform) has been the research hotspot for years. However, the research is insufficient on how communities restructured forest tenure throughout this top-down devolution reform and the evolution and dynamics of community-level forest tenure changes over a long-term period. Based on the mixed methodology and multiple data sources, this study explores the community-level forest tenure changes in China's post-2003 reform using the case of Fujian. We identify various types of community-level forest tenure changes and classify them into reallocation (transferring forest property rights between different types of managers) and formalization (enhancing tenure security without changing the manager type). We find the community-level forest tenure changes in Fujian's reform are more of formalizations rather than reallocations. The limited number of reallocations mainly takes the form of transferring forests to villagers' groups and specialized private entities in addition to individual households and small-scale household groups. Forest tenure changes on the ground are institutionally diversified, path-dependent, and parcel-specific, and they are shaped by a series of factors such as tree species, existing manager types, customary management rules, and various community attributes. We suggest that evaluations on China's post-2003 reform need to differentiate reallocations from formalizations and investigate their effects separately, and parcel-specific data from non-household entities, especially various common-property organizations, should be collected and incorporated in future analyses.