Stabilizing Forests and Communities: Accommodative Buffering within China's Collective Forest Tenure Reform

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In the last decade, Chinese state authorities have overseen an expansive effort to restructure property rights pertaining to forests that belong to rural collectives. The stated aim of Collective Forest Tenure System Reform (jiti linquan zhidu gaige 集体林权制度改革, or linquan gaige 林权改革, hereafter CFTR) is to enhance economic production and environmental services provided by forests by clarifying property rights and implementing incentives for more efficient use.¹ Policy statements regarding CFTR unambiguously endorse allocating tenure rights to households. Between 2003 and 2013, forestry personnel mobilized in rural communities across the country to survey forest boundaries and facilitate community decision-making processes. Residents in each community would vote on whether to divide collective forests among individual households, adopt a shareholding arrangement, or undertake other forms of collective management.

These reforms have the potential to revolutionize the governance of forestlands that account for three-fifths of China's forested area. How these changes proceed could affect the capacity of China's forests to contain soil erosion, harbour a diversity of living things and sequester carbon in biomass – all issues of domestic and international concern. Associated efforts to commercialize forestry could reorient domestic and international markets in forest products. At a time when the prospect of privatizing farmland commands widespread attention,² while the social and environmental consequences of rangeland parcelization stoke debate,³ understanding forest tenure changes is vital to explaining how state agents and rural residents negotiate competing priorities around tenure and land use. Finally, the livelihoods and political roles of rural dwellers are tightly bound to forests. The reallocation of rights to forestlands affects hundreds of millions for whom forests remain a source of subsistence and income. Moreover, official environmental discourse, in which forests are at front and centre, places responsibility for producing environmental goods on rural residents. Rural people have gone from being presented as peasants whose poverty drives resource degradation to farmer-stewards whose careful tending of land is critical to the national good.⁴ This recasting has the potential to transform not only people's livelihoods but also their relationships with state authorities and with the lands on which they dwell.

We set out to examine varying CFTR implementation in a heavily forested region of south-west China. The situation we encountered differed...