Collective forests and the community at the legal frontier of property rights reforms in China

Abstract Collective forests have long played an important economic, cultural and social role in the remote mountainous areas of China, especially before the Open and Reform Period. However, the centrist legal framework for managing and utilizing the collective forests was not sufficiently well developed to meet the demands of all community members, which led to largely unfettered overuse and illegal logging. This “tragedy of the commons” meant that the traditional human-forest connections that were so important in these areas gradually collapsed, to be replaced by self-interest. This situation informed a period of property rights reform in which steps were taken to introduce a form of legal pluralism that could improve both security of tenure and forest management. Using a study of Hongtian Village in Southern China, where forest tenure reform started, we argue that pluralist collective action is essential in order to identify grass-root solutions to the management of the forest commons. This involves the use rights for collective forests being separated from those of ownership, with the former distributed to households, according to their own, local, rules. While this new pluralist approach to forest tenure fostered renewed confidence in the potential for collective forestry to underpin community prosperity, the paper goes on to show how renewed top-down intervention, this time to promote a more ecological approach to forest management, has once again undermined the significance of people-forest relationships. We conclude by arguing that forests are very much at the frontier of property rights reform in China, because their effective governance depends utterly upon ensuring a plural approach to regulation that central authorities are currently unwilling to legitimate.