Village Collectives Research Articles

Globalization, state intervention, local action and rural locality reconstitution - A case study from rural China

Rural China, as an important part of the countryside all over the world, has been drastically restructured under the contemporary globalization and state intervention. In this paper we seek to develop a framework of reconstitution practice in rural China to bridge rural locality reconstitution and globalization and state intervention. Firstly, based on reviewing the literature in western country settings, we analyze the rural institutional reforms and policy innovations adopted by Chinese government under globalization, identifying the implementing path of state policies and the generic logic of local action. Then, the framework is examined through a case study of Jiudian village in the northern part of Jiangsu province, especially paying attention to the operational power in rural locality reconstitution such as the local government institutions, village collectives, and non-local investor's influence in reproducing rural place. It is argued that the progressive state intervention in rural development mainly aim at reorganizing agriculture sector and rural China to prepare for taking part in globalization to realize industrialization and modernization, and that the local governments act as the creative executors of national policies and the coordinators of local action leading to rural locality reconstitution in terms of industry, society and space. Despite being not entirely opened to global commodity market, the rural locality in China has been evidently featured by international circumstance. Similar to the rural area in developed world, the rural locality reconstitution in China also present contestation, such as the potential risks of unemployment and increased living cost linked to the inflow of external capital and rural settlement relocation.

Evaluating Poverty Alleviation by Relocation under the Link Policy: A Case Study from Tongyu County, Jilin Province, China

Land, nature, and the social environment in contiguous poor regions are harsh and difficult to change. The poor adaptive capacities of the socio-ecological systems of these regions are the main causes of deep, persistent poverty. In February 2016, the Chinese government issued a policy proposing to promote poverty alleviation by relocation (PAR) by means of the “Linking increases in urban construction land with decreases in rural construction land” policy (or simply, the “Link Policy” or LP), which intends to realize the sustainable social and economic development of local villages. Since then, many pilot projects have been carried out across the country based on local resources, environment, and economic development; however, few related studies on these cases have been conducted. After a review of poverty alleviation policies, this paper first introduces the unsustainable conditions of poor rural areas and the implications and advantages of PAR under the Link Policy; we then analyzed the complete PAR process, including formulation, implementation, and completion, by taking Tongyu County in Jilin Province as an example. The study found that the “whole village relocation” model practiced in Tongyu County was relatively successful in terms of improving the living environment, income, and public services of local villagers. On the other hand, there were three main problems: first, many follow-up industries were dominated by the village collectives and heavily dependent on government support or subsidies; second, the newly built village faced the dilemma of “re-hollowing” due to the out-migration of young people and the aging population; third, it was difficult to achieve a true requisition–compensation balance of farmland.

Institutional change and diversity in the transfer of land development rights in China: The case of Chengdu

Rapid urbanisation in China has led to a substantial decrease in agricultural land. To address this unsustainable form of urban development, the Chinese government has implemented the ‘Linkage’ Policy ( Zengjian Guagou), which requires any increase in new urban land by local governments to be compensated for with an equivalent amount of new arable land. This paper examines the institutional changes and the implications for China’s land production and development arising from this mechanism of transferring land development rights from the rural to the urban sectors. Using Chengdu as a case study, our research concludes that this institutional mechanism has conferred commodified and tradeable development rights on rural land, leading to the emergence and direct involvement of new players in village land consolidation, resettlement of affected villagers and, indirectly, in the supply of new urban land. Process efficiency has been improved with the local governments, developers and village collectives capitalising on their niches in village improvement projects. The conventional state-led model of land production is enriched with bottom-up market initiatives, and villagers have more choices to realise their land property rights under the dual land market. Land use efficiency has been enhanced by the reallocation of construction land potential. However, infringements of villagers’ interests and negative impacts on balanced regional development under this policy were also found.

Social relations, public interventions and land rent deviation: Evidence from Jiangsu Province in China

The price mechanism plays an important role in allocating resources and enhancing economic efficiency and equity of land markets. In this paper, we examine the impacts of social relations between rental partners and public interventions imposed by local governments or village collectives on land rent deviation and discuss efficiency and equity impacts as well. Household-level data collected in 2014 covering 907 households in 30 villages in Jiangsu Province, China, are used for empirical analysis. We find that social relations based on blood ties and geographical location increase the levels of land rent deviation and lead to a loss of efficiency and equity of the segmented land rental market. However, public interventions, i.e., land use limitations, collective permission and collective organization, may contribute to reducing land rent deviation and improving the efficiency and equity of the market. Further evidence suggests that public interventions induce land rental transactions among partners other than relatives or familiar villagers.

Regression Adjustments for Estimating the Global Treatment Effect in Experiments with Interference

Abstract Standard estimators of the global average treatment effect can be biased in the presence of interference. This paper proposes regression adjustment estimators for removing bias due to interference in Bernoulli randomized experiments. We use a fitted model to predict the counterfactual outcomes of global control and global treatment. Our work differs from standard regression adjustments in that the adjustment variables are constructed from functions of the treatment assignment vector, and that we allow the researcher to use a collection of any functions correlated with the response, turning the problem of detecting interference into a feature engineering problem. We characterize the distribution of the proposed estimator in a linear model setting and connect the results to the standard theory of regression adjustments under SUTVA. We then propose an estimator that allows for flexible machine learning estimators to be used for fitting a nonlinear interference functional form. We propose conducting statistical inference via bootstrap and resampling methods, which allow us to sidestep the complicated dependences implied by interference and instead rely on empirical covariance structures. Such variance estimation relies on an exogeneity assumption akin to the standard unconfoundedness assumption invoked in observational studies. In simulation experiments, our methods are better at debiasing estimates than existing inverse propensity weighted estimators based on neighborhood exposure modeling. We use our method to reanalyze an experiment concerning weather insurance adoption conducted on a collection of villages in rural China.

Implications of insecticide resistance for malaria vector control with long-lasting insecticidal nets: evidence from health facility data from Benin

BackgroundInsecticide-based interventions have averted more than 500 million malaria cases since 2000, but insecticide resistance in mosquitoes could bring about a rebound in disease and mortality. This study investigated whether insecticide resistance was associated with increased incidence of clinical malaria.MethodsIn an area of southern Benin with insecticide resistance and high use of insecticide-treated nets (ITNs), malaria morbidity and insecticide resistance were measured simultaneously in 30 clusters (villages or collections of villages) multiple times over the course of 2 years. Insecticide resistance frequencies were measured using the standard World Health Organization bioassay test. Malaria morbidity was measured by cases recorded at health facilities both in the whole population using routinely collected data and in a passively followed cohort of children under 5 years old.ResultsThere was no evidence that incidence of malaria from routinely collected data was higher in clusters with resistance frequencies above the median, either in children aged under 5 (RR = 1.27 (95% CI 0.81–2.00) p = 0.276) or in individuals aged 5 or over (RR = 1.74 (95% CI 0.91–3.34) p = 0.093). There was also no evidence that incidence was higher in clusters with resistance frequencies above the median in the passively followed cohort (RR = 1.11 (0.52–2.35) p = 0.777).ConclusionsThis study found no association between frequency of resistance and incidence of clinical malaria in an area where ITNs are the principal form of vector control. This may be because, as other studies have shown, ITNs continue to offer some protection from malaria even in the presence of insecticide resistance. Irrespective of resistance, nets provide only partial protection so the development of improved or supplementary vector control tools is required to reduce Africa’s unacceptably high malaria burden.

The Building Extraction Based on Object Oriented Classification Method in High Vegetation Coverage Area

Quickly extraction of building information technology is an important application in urban development planning, electronic information, national defense and others. This paper takes Landsat-8 multispectral and panchromatic data as data source, using the local variance method to select the optimal segmentation scale, normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) and the normalized building index (NDBI) and panchromatic brightness value of an object oriented classification rule extraction. The high vegetation coverage area of buildings, and through the spatial relationships and distinguishing feature of collections of buildings independent buildings and villages. The results showed that Google earth high resolution image analysis and accuracy evaluation. the results of the extraction based on the overall accuracy of village extraction was 83%, the accuracy of extraction of independent buildings was 70%, according to the L8 remote sensing data, object oriented classification method can quickly and accurately extract the high vegetation coverage area of the building.

Property rights with price tags? Pricing uncertainties in the production, transaction and consumption of China’s small property right housing

The booming informal housing market has played an important role in providing inexpensive housing for lower income population in the developing world. In China, an informal housing strategy known as “Small Property Right Housing (SPRH)” is thriving on collective land owned by village collectives, and providing housing for more than a quarter of a billion people. Why and how the informal housing market has emerged and operates have been widely explored theoretically and empirically from the perspective of the peculiar arrangement of property rights that has created this market. Yet, we know very little about the pricing of this market, with its various constraints and uncertainties associated with the incomplete property rights. Most existing research takes a standard dichotomous view of property rights and thus overlooks the complexity of the degrees of rights that make possible this thriving informal market. Our study takes the more heterodox idea of a bundle of property rights that taken as a whole confers a graded degree of protection to a buyer at production, transaction and consumption stage, to understand offer-price determination in the SPRH market of China. Drawing on a large database of SPRH records in the city of Shenzhen, this is among the first attempts to quantitatively examine the pricing mechanism of China’s informal housing market. Our results show that even without clearly defined property rights, a well-functioning market of SPRH can exist. We find that the ambiguous rights created by the informal institutions involved in the production, transaction and consumption of SPRH are capitalised in the price. This research is of theoretical and empirical significance to understand the dynamics of informal housing development and how the market behaves when property rights are ill-defined.

State-Led Development of China's Model Towns: The Case of Guangdong

Town development significantly drove China's rural industrialisation and urbanisation forward during the 1980s and 1990s. This article examines the state-led development of model towns since the early 2000s. A case study of Guangdong province demonstrates that all levels of the government administration system have been involved in the establishment of model towns, forming a state-led development framework from "above". As is evident in the state-led framework, prefectural and county governments control the development even though the central and provincial governments have established major development programmes and organised local governments to implement them. Government interactions have therefore resulted in diverse development paths with varying effects among regions. While state-led development has involved industrialists as a crucial force, it has largely excluded forces from "below", such as village collectives and rural migrants.

Land grabbing by villagers? Insights from intimate land grabbing in the rise of industrial tree plantation sector in Guangxi, China

While most studies focus on large-scale foreign corporate-dominated land grabbing, relatively small-scale land acquisitions initiated by local villagers receive much less attention. This reflects that the scale, the identity of investors and a simplified role of villagers tend to take precedence in analyses of land grabbing. However, the common dichotomies of “large vs small”, “outside vs local actors” and “victim vs grabber” might be problematic and even misleading, considering the case of Guangxi.In China’s Guangxi province, with the rise of the industrial tree planation (ITP) sector, some villagers have gained control over the land from local or nearby village collectives and have become owners of ITPs. Over the course of these practices, grabbers are not from “outside”, but “local villagers” themselves. They are then able to control the land, which was originally collectively used and benefit from it at the expense of their neighbours and kin, under certain contexts. Such land control change is called intimate land grabbing.This case demonstrates that: (1) small-scale land grabs are not necessarily less significant than large-scale ones; (2) land grabs dominated by local actors sometimes have more serious adverse impacts on local communities; and (3) villagers can also be grabbers, rather than simply victims, or otherwise resisters. In bringing the issue of intimate land grabbing into the debate, this paper argues that the importance of a land grab is neither represented by its scale nor the identity of the grabber(s), but by its de facto consequences, especially the distribution of the costs and benefits. This piece hopes to highlight the importance of dynamics of social relations around land and production processes in analyses of land grabbing and contribute to a fuller picture of global land grabbing.

The Research of Agricultural Landscape Evolution in Mountain Area of Southern Jinan Based on Stakeholder Theory

In the course of social evolution, urban fringe districts have been attracting more and more attention and the management and control of ecological protection have been strengthened as well. Meanwhile, the Party Central Committee also puts emphasis on the importance of agricultural landscape. Urban fringe districts represented by mountain area of southern Jinan are under control of the government and restricted in a settled ecological redline. Therefore, it is difficult for agricultural landscape to exert its economic function in tourism and leisure. Under this circumstance, the government’s demand for preservation and the people’s demand for development have created a conflict of land use. On the basis of stakeholder theory, this paper takes a further step to analyze the multivariate game among local government, village collectives and villagers. The demand and willing of key stakeholders should be reasonably expressed to integrate agricultural development with tertiary industry, guarantee the proper layout of agricultural landscape in space during the course of land evolution, thus its comprehensive value functions can be accomplished.

Redefining property rights over collective land in the urban redevelopment of Shenzhen, China

Urban development in China is based on two types of land ownership, namely, state land owned by states and collective land owned by village collectives. Legally speaking, urban development must be based on state land. In practice, informal development based on collective land has played important roles in the rapid urbanization process over the past decades. Nonetheless, the vague property rights over collective land have led to inferior and suboptimal development outcomes in expansive urban areas. The redevelopment of collective land has become an important means to sustain urban development in an ongoing urbanization process. By adopting theoretical perspectives from New Institutional Economics, this study presents an integrated conceptual framework on the institutional arrangements of land property rights and transaction costs to understand the changes in land policies and their institutional implications for the redevelopment of collective land in Shenzhen, China. The findings reveal that the new policies have redefined the relationship among the government, village collectives, and real estate developers as well as their property rights over collective land. The change of institutional arrangements in land property rights has significantly reduced the transaction costs in the redevelopment process and effectively promoted land redevelopment activities.

Reconsidering gendered sexualities in a generalized AIDS epidemic.

Using the threat of a severe AIDS epidemic in a collection of rural villages in South Africa, we illustrate how men and women reconsider gendered sexualities through conversations and interactions in everyday life. We draw from data collected by local ethnographers and focus on the processes through which men and women collectively respond to the threat posed by AIDS to relationships, families, and communities. Whereas previous research has shown that individuals often reaffirm hegemonic norms about gender and sexuality in response to disruptions to heteronormative gender relations, we find that the threat of AIDS provokes reconsideration of gendered sexualities at the community level. That is, our data demonstrate how men and women-through the interactions and exchanges that make up their daily lives-debate, challenge, make sense of, and attempt to come to terms with social norms circumscribing gendered sexual practices in a context where the threat of a fatal disease transmitted through sex looms large. We argue that ethnographic data are particularly useful for capturing communal responses to events that threaten heteronormative gender relations and reflect on how our findings inform theories of gender relations and processes.

Institutional barriers to redevelopment of urban villages in China: A transaction cost perspective

Compared with other newly developed urban areas, urban villages in China are in greater need for redevelopment. Governed by institutions inherited from the local-state-dominated dual land ownership system, the redevelopment of these villages follows a state-led land requisition system, which confers development rights to local governments while limiting the rights of village collectives. Two other complementary arrangements include the top-down land use planning system and the state-monopolized land transfer system. Although these institutional arrangements favor land conversion in greenfield development, they cannot be easily implemented in the village redevelopment process. By reviewing the redevelopment policies and practices, this study empirically examines the redevelopment of urban villages in Shenzhen during the policy period from 2004 to 2009 and adopts the transaction cost perspective in analyzing how state-led institutional arrangements have resulted in many time-consuming transactions and hindered the redevelopment of urban villages.

From urban sprawl to land consolidation in suburban Shanghai under the backdrop of increasing versus decreasing balance policy: A perspective of property rights transfer

Since the 1980s, Chinese cities have witnessed significant growth, resulting in urban sprawl all over the country. Under the strict land quota system, local government has had to transform its approach of Greenfield development to land consolidation. Under the ‘Increasing and Decreasing Balance’ land use policy, the Shanghai government began to consolidate rural construction land in order to acquire extra quota for state land by transferring development rights from collective land to state land and by establishing a three-level land consolidation planning system. This paper firstly examines the expansion of non-agricultural land in Shanghai since 1990. It explains the policy arrangements of land consolidation from the perspective of property rights transfer between state and collective land. Taking Xinbang Township as an example, this paper examines the roles of various stakeholders in land consolidation, the municipalities, district and township governments, village collectives, local villagers and entrepreneurs, and analyses the impact land consolidation has upon them. The paper concludes with discussion and policy implications of future land consolidation.

Performance Analysis of a VPV/FC Hybrid System for Generating Electricity in Iraq's Remote Areas

A reliable electrical energy supply is a prerequisite for improving the standard economic and quality of life levels in a country. As is the case in many countries, Iraq is home to a collection of remote villages. Since it is uneconomical to connect these villages to the existing grid, the installation of stand- alone electrical power generators has become common practice. As a result, diesel stand-alone power generators see widespread use in these remote locales, which, whilst fit for their intended purpose, unfortunately suffer from several drawbacks, including instability in regards to everyday oil prices and a number of environmental issues. The implementation of a PV/FC hybrid power system could be one potential alternative to help solve these problems. Therefore, this paper will present PV/FC system control strategies alongside information relating to the performance of such system components, based on a case study that was conducted in Al-Gowair, Iraq. This study is especially important in terms of envisioning the future energy supply needs of Iraq. The HOMER simulation results showed that by using the proposed control strategies and suggested components of a PV/FC system, it was able to produce a satisfactory outcome.

“Not Rural but Not Urban”: Community Governance in China's Urban Villages

AbstractChina's urbanization has created a large number of urban villages which, although they have been transferred to urban administration, have maintained their collective economies. Using a comparative perspective, this article investigates how villagers, the village collectives and the urban administration organize community governance in three urban villages on the fringes of the cities of Guangzhou, Wuhan and Shenyang. The findings suggest that successful village collective shareholding companies play a leading role in community governance by providing villagers with economic and social welfare, subsidizing community administration services, and mobilizing residents. The comparative analysis also shows that village shareholding companies employ different mechanisms based on the varied histories of their village collective economies, the ability of the village collectives to mobilize resources, and the degree to which the village collectives are engaged in the grassroots administrative structure. The article argues that the “not rural but not urban” governance mode of the urban villages illustrates China's fragmented urbanization planning. At the same time, it illuminates the dynamics of state–society relations during China's urbanization and how landless villagers and village collectives respond to urban transformation by adopting different strategies to preserve their individual and collective interests.

Land use dynamics driven by rural industrialization and land finance in the peri-urban areas of China: “The examples of Jiangyin and Shunde”

As China experienced rapid economic growth, non-agricultural land, particularly industrial land, expanded significantly within its peri-urban areas. This paper takes two typical peri-urban areas: Jiangyin in the Yangtze River Delta and Shunde in the Pearl River Delta, as cases, and applies landscape ecology indices to analyze land use dynamics through overlay of their land use maps from 2001 to 2010. This research reveals that local cadres such as township governments and village collectives utilize land finance as a strategy to contest the reshuffling of central-local power brought about by the 1994 tax-sharing scheme. Meanwhile, under the stringent land quota system, local cadres allocated most quotas to the industrial sector in order to encourage economic growth. However, the fragmented governance regime, including county/city, township to administrative village and natural village, led to land fragmentation, which had adverse impacts on sustainable development. In general, the research on land use of peri-urban areas requires a comprehensive perspective of social, economic and institutional aspects.

Chinese Resource-driven Development Model by Village Collective Revisited: Evidence from Northwestern Oasis Farming Region

Chinese Resource-driven Development Model by Village Collective Revisited: Evidence from Northwestern Oasis Farming Region

Assessing the impacts of fiscal reforms on investment in village‐level irrigation infrastructure

AbstractThis paper investigates investment trends into village‐level irrigation projects and assesses the impact of fiscal reforms including the tax‐for‐fee reform and the elimination of agricultural tax on irrigation investment. The China Water Institutions and Management Panel Survey data show that village leaders, water user associations, farmers, and upper level governments have all contributed to irrigation investment in villages throughout the study period between 1996 and 2007. Both descriptive and multivariate analyses suggest that changes brought by fiscal reforms have significantly reduced village collectives' capacity to fund irrigation infrastructure in villages. There was a significant drop in upper level government investment during the posttax‐for‐fee period (2002–2004 in the sample areas). Since 2005, upper level government has increased its investment to prereform levels and partly filled the public investment void in irrigation infrastructure. Fiscal reforms had the least impact on farmers' investment, which has been the most stable source of funding for village‐level irrigation projects.