The effectiveness of voluntary collective action in China's rural land development

Abstract

China is gradually and directly making rural collective land available on the land market. It is important to understand how stakeholders collectively treat and manage this land, and if this collective action leads to effective and sustainable results. This paper, however, revises Ostrom's framework of collective action by constructing the joint analysis of social capital, trust, and cooperation performance, in order to better capture the distinction between voluntary action and enforced action of stakeholders towards a sustainable goal. We analyze the role of voluntary collective action through higher-order structural equation modeling (HSEM), applied to a database consisting of 324 households in Jiangsu Province, China, collected in 2022 and 2023. The results suggest that social capital effectively promotes villagers' trust in policy implementers by establishing new institutions, increasing actors' trustworthiness, and improving channels of information exchange, and the first two means are more effective than the latter. We also demonstrate the significant positive effect of trust on cooperation performance, with trusting relationships with familiar groups and the credible behavior of policy implementers affecting performance outcomes of collective action. Moreover, social capital drives cooperation performance through the mediating effect of mutual trust that it breeds. With this revised framework and verified hypotheses one can thus create more effective policies to avoid inequality and informality in the land marketization process in China.