Search Results (16)

Ensuring that “each household has a dwelling” is a fundamental principle in the reform of the rural housing system. Pilot areas for residential reform have achieved positive outcomes in rural collective housing. This paper, based on a field study conducted in District D of Province G, utilizes a case study methodology and the Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) framework to explore the driving mechanisms behind the implementation of collective housing in the pilot villages of District D. It comprehensively analyzes the roles of various stakeholders throughout the entire process of “planning, construction, distribution, and management”, and evaluates the effectiveness of the initiative. The findings of the study indicate that collective housing construction can effectively alleviate land scarcity, meet the housing demands of rural residents, and enhance the overall rural environment. To ensure the successful implementation of collective housing projects, the government must assume a coordinating and guiding role, providing necessary financial and land support while streamlining the approval process. Village collectives should actively manage residential land and respect the preferences of farming households. Furthermore, pricing, allocation, and management strategies should be tailored to local conditions to ensure fairness and safeguard farmers’ rights and interests. Policies should remain adaptable, taking into account regional differences in geography, society, and culture, and selectively incorporating collective housing models to achieve the goal of “each household having a dwelling.” Full article

Spatial justice, as a fundamental value in social systems, plays a key role in achieving social justice and improving human well-being. Drawing on theories of spatial justice, property rights, and new institutional economics, this study explores the comprehensive impact of land development rights (LDR) transfer on urban–rural spatial economic, resources, social, and ecological equity from the perspective of urban–rural spatial justice. Using the Chongqing land quota trading pilot as the core case, we apply synthetic control methods to analyze the causal effects of this policy. The results show that LDR transfer promotes urban–rural spatial resources equity in the short term, particularly through the marketization of land transactions. Over the long term, it significantly enhances urban–rural spatial economic and social equity, evidenced by the narrowing of the income gap, the growth of the primary industry, and improved connectivity between urban and rural areas. However, the improvement in ecological equity through LDR transfer lacks sustainability, suggesting the need for stronger ecological protection measures in future policies. By establishing a comprehensive framework for urban–rural spatial justice and using comparative spatial indicators to measure equity, this study advances our understanding of how LDR transfer can promote urban–rural spatial justice and provides valuable insights for future policy refinement and institutional reforms. Full article

The study investigates controlled environment agriculture (CEA) in Nigeria focusing on its feasibility, economic benefits, environmental impact, and socio-economic implications. While CEA technologies such as hydroponics, vertical farming, automation, and greenhouse systems offer efficiency and yield improvements, this review highlights the extent to which they can be utilized in solving the food challenges facing the country including food shortages, wasteful use of land, and climatic disturbances in agriculture. However, their adoption faces challenges like high initial costs, technical knowledge gaps, and unstable energy infrastructure. Additionally, there is a lack of localized research on resource utilization, crop profitability, and the scalability of these systems in Nigeria’s urban and rural contexts, which further hinders adoption. Government policy reforms, renewable energy access, and capacity-building programs are crucial to overcoming these barriers. Localized pilot projects and field studies are also necessary to validate the feasibility of CEA systems under Nigeria’s unique socio-economic and climatic conditions. Cross-country comparisons with South Africa and Kenya reveal actionable insights for Nigeria’s CEA implementation such as South Africa’s public-private partnerships and Kenya’s solar-powered vertical farms which can serve as actionable blueprints for Nigeria’s CEA adoption and expansion. Nigeria with its teeming population is food import-dependent, with agricultural imports reaching 3.35 trillion Naira between 2019 and 2023. This is unsustainable and requires alternative measures including targeted CEA interventions to increase its agricultural productivity. Overall, for CEA to contribute meaningfully to the Nigerian agricultural sector, specific changes including targeted subsidies, policy reforms, renewable energy access, stakeholder engagement, capacity-building programs, and infrastructure development must be instituted to achieve sustainable agricultural growth. Furthermore, strategies such as hybridizing traditional and CEA practices and creating “pay-as-you-grow” financial models for CEA infrastructure can make the transition more viable for smallholder farmers, who dominate Nigeria’s agricultural sector. Full article

Farmland mortgages are expected to drive county agricultural economic growth (CAEG) as a crucial component of furthering the reform of the rural land system and the reform of the rural financial system against the new backdrop of the new era. This study gathers panel data from 2045 Chinese counties from 2011 to 2020 and uses the difference-in-differences method and the synthetic control method to systematically examine the effects of China’s farmland management right mortgage loan (FMRML) pilot program on CAEG. The FMRML pilot program was implemented in 2016, and this research is presented as a quasi-natural experiment. The findings indicate that there is a “policy trap” and that CAEG has not been successfully promoted by the FMRML pilot program. The reason for this is because the pilot program has made county resource mismatch worse, making it unable to fully realize the promotional effect on CAEG, rather than significantly activating the three key drivers of agricultural economic growth: people, land, and money. The impact of the FMRML pilot policy on CAEG is not uniform, according to the results of the heterogeneity study, with a substantial “blocking” effect only in the central region and no significant influence in the western, northeastern, or eastern regions. The findings propose that in order to optimize agricultural mortgage policy and advance CAEG, China and other emerging nations can benefit greatly from the insights this study offers. Full article

The withdrawal of rural residential land-use rights is a major initiative in China’s current rural land reform, and it is of great importance in promoting the rural revitalization and urbanization strategy. The Chinese government encourages farmers to withdraw from their residential bases in an orderly manner to effectively revitalize land resources. The study aimed to explore the key factors that influenced the decision of farmers to withdraw from their rural residential lands in different contexts and proposed suggestions for related policy reforms. Firstly, the study proposed hypotheses based on the theories of the hierarchy of needs and peasant household behavior, combined with the current situation of the research area. Then taking the withdrawal policies and practical experiences of some pilot areas in China as a reference. Secondly, the study set five exit modes for withdrawing the right to use rural residential land and programmed four dimensions of the factors that affected those decisions to form the questionnaire. A total of 533 valid questionnaires were obtained by using scenario simulation. Thirdly, the study analyzed the influential factors of the exit decisions of the different modes using the multivariate ordered logistic regression model and tested the hypotheses using the abovementioned methods. The results showed the following: (1) the willingness of the rural residents to accept the different exit modes for withdrawing their rural residential land-use rights substantially varied. The rural residents prioritized the exit modes that were beneficial to their future housing and other social security. (2) There were some differences in the influencing factors on the exit decisions. Among the four-dimensional factors, the “rural residents’ cognitive characteristics” had a substantial impact on the decisions for withdrawing rural residential land-use rights. Based on the research conclusions, the study proposed some targeted policy suggestions: steadily promoting the construction of a high-quality social security system, promoting classified governance policies based on the diversified needs of farmers and strengthening the individual cognition of relocated farmers to withdraw from homesteads. In addition, a more scientific and reasonable land governance system needs to be established. Full article

Rural operation system reform is vital in promoting rural revitalisation and agricultural and rural modernisation in China. Based on the sample data of 153 counties in Sichuan Province from 2012 to 2020, this paper constructs a PSM-DID evaluation model to analyse the effectiveness of rural operation system reform on agricultural development from the perspective of policy action mechanism, variable differentiation and other aspects. The results show that: (1) rural operation system reform has significantly boosted the economic development of the counties implementing the pilot reform of the rural operation system; (2) rural operation system reform mainly has two components: rural land system reform and agriculture organisation innovation; both have an impact on county economic and social development, but the degrees of impact are different; (3) the effectiveness of the rural operation system reform policy has a specific time lag. The results of this paper enrich the effectiveness evaluation of the reform policy on economic development and have policy implications for further promotion of agricultural and rural reform in China. Full article

Understanding the impact of the three pilot reforms of the rural land system (TRRLS) on rural residential land use transition (RRLUT) based on the land use transition (LUT) theory is crucial for promoting rural land system reform. However, there is still a lack of research on this, and the LUT theory also needs to be improved from a systematic perspective to eliminate the misunderstanding of LUT in academia. To address this, this study firstly attempts to deepen the conceptual model and the understanding of characteristics of LUT from a regime shifts perspective. LUT is the transformation of the land use system as one regime passes into another, where a difference in the analytical perspective of land use morphology generates different transition results. The process of LUT can simultaneously or solely involve dominant morphology and recessive morphology transitions, and there are two types of LUT: positive and negative transitions. Moreover, LUT in different regions may have pathway differences and the convergence of results. Then, a theoretical analysis framework of the pathways of RRLUT under the TRRLS is constructed to detect the impact mechanism by using Wujin district, China to obtain empirical evidence. The results reveal that the recessive morphology transition of rural residential land in Wujin under the TRRLS is significant, while the dominant morphology transition in land quantity structure and spatial distribution is relatively slow. Furthermore, two internal factors of population urbanization and migration, the demand for rural collective economic development, as well as the two external factors of the TRRLS and market factors, such as nonlocals’ demand for housing and rural enterprises’ demand for land, have, to a certain extent, weakened the resilience of the rural land use system and promoted RRLUT. Here, the TRRLS have, by removing the institutional barrier to RRLUT, become the key to the transition. Full article

Dealing with relationships on farmland is one of the most important issues in China. Since its reform and opening up, the policies of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China (CPC) on “agriculture, rural areas, and farmers” have been embodied in the Central No. 1 document. The documents, which represent the purpose of China, reveal the strategic direction and development ideas of the state. Based on Central No. 1 documents published by the Central Committee of the CPC, and using the attention theory from psychology, we proposed PAI and PAD indicators to express the Central Committee of the CPC’s concern and direction on agriculture, and then measured the change in attention allocation of the Central Committee of the CPC’s land policy, as well as what is “new” in the land policy system. Results showed that: First, the attention allocation of the Central Committee of the CPC’s land policy (PAI) shows a wave-like upward trend from 3.9% to 5%, and has gone through the stage of contracting management to benefit people’s livelihoods and liberate productivity, the stage of allocating land resource elements under scientific use control, and the stage of expanding power and enabling capacity to promote the modernization of land management. Second, the policy attention direction (PAD) has experienced a process from the early focus on the release of land factor productivity to the optimal allocation of land factor resources and then to the modernization of land management. Third, the scope of attention allocation is gradually expanding, especially for the construction of ecological civilization and promotion of the modernization of land management. To be specific, it is necessary to reasonably arrange the overall planning of China’s land policy system based on the actual situation, and to clarify and optimize the development direction and the proportion of attention allocation in its subdivision fields. The intention to be the first to push forward the implementation of the relevant policies and pilot issues of land governance modernization will become the new trend of the future research. Based on the actual situation, we should continue to emancipate prevailing perceptions and combine the focus of rural land reform to inject vitality into rural development and into the development of the whole economy and society. Full article

The entry of collective-owned commercial construction land into the market is a major reform of China’s land management system, which will help promote the appreciation of rural land, establish a unified urban and rural construction land market, and help rural revitalisation and urban–rural integrated development. Based on the classic customer satisfaction index model, this study constructs a satisfaction model for farmers who enter the market with collective-owned commercial construction land. Farmers’ satisfaction is measured by 7 latent variables and the corresponding 22 observed variables, forming a causal chain containing 13 pairs of interactions. Taking as an example Dazu District of Chongqing City, one of the pilot areas where China’s collective-owned commercial construction land has come on the market, AMOS statistical analysis software is used to test the hypotheses. The research results show that: farmers’ information awareness has the greatest impact on farmers’ satisfaction; the higher farmers’ perceived quality is, the more they can improve their satisfaction; there is a significant relationship between farmers’ satisfaction, farmers’ complaints and farmers’ trust; and the three are closely related. Finally, based on the research results, we try to put forward targeted policy suggestions in order to provide a useful reference for government to push for the promotion of the collective-owned commercial construction land marketisation in other rural areas of China and its future improvement. Full article

Land urbanization (LU) and population urbanization (PU) maintain the nature of spatiotemporal heterogeneity in China. As a municipality directly administered by the central government in the mode of “large cities and large rural areas”, Chongqing’s urbanization process is the epitome of China’s urbanization process. This paper examines the spatiotemporal variability of LU and PU in Chongqing on the basis of nighttime light data, the elasticity coefficient of the coupling relationship, and GWR. The results show that (1) the urban land and urban population in Chongqing grew notably from 2008 to 2018, with average annual growth rates of 9.4% and 2.3%, respectively. (2) The coupling coordination coefficient of LU and PU in Chongqing was 0.24, and the total number of districts and counties with uncoordinated development increased, but the overall uncoordinated situation gradually improved over the period. (3) The influence of PU on LU in each district and county increased year by year, and it showed a decreasing trend from southwest to northeast in Chongqing, which indicates that LU was increasingly adapted to the construction needs of PU. The gap between LU and PU widened due to the household registration system, land fiscal policies and other policies. After the reform of the household registration system and the adjustment of new pilot policies targeting the construction of new-type urbanization, the coupling relationship between LU and PU was gradually improving to the coordinated mode. The findings indicate that Chinese urban areas should adhere to the principle of new-type urbanization construction and carry out scientific land planning strategies, strictly controlling land expansion to promote the reasonable development of population growth. Full article

As an important way to innovate the pattern of land reform, the land system pilots serve as the crucial driving force in promoting rural economic development under the background of rural revitalization. Based on the panel data of 10 pilots along the Yellow River basin, this paper chose 111 near and distant neighboring regions from 2009 to 2018. This paper tested the spillover effects and regional heterogeneity characteristics of the land system pilots using the propensity score matching-difference-in-differences (PSM-DID) method and regression discontinuity design (RDD). The results are as follows: first, the land system pilots have a significant and general impact on regional economic development; second, the establishment of the land system pilots has different impacts on the economic development of near and distant neighboring regions, which shows obvious policy-effect spillovers; and third, the land system pilots have the strongest stimulating effect on the economic development of the middle reaches of the Yellow River basin, as well as the weakest stimulating effect on upstream regional economic development, which shows the significant spatial heterogeneity of policy effects. The results of the research study are of great significance for the exploration of regionally differentiated system-supply pilots under the background of rural revitalization. Additionally, this study has important implications for further land system improvements and rural economic developments. Full article

After the political change in Nepal of 1951, leapfrog land policy improvements have been recorded, however, the land reform initiatives have been short of full success. Despite a land administration system based on cadaster and land registries in place, 25% of the arable land with an estimated 10 million spatial units on the ground are informally occupied and are off-register. Recently, a strong political will has emerged to ensure land rights for all. Providing tenure security to all these occupants using the conventional surveying and land administration approach demands a large amount of skilled human resources, a long timeframe and a huge budget. To assess the suitability of the fit-for-purpose land administration (FFPLA) approach for nationwide mapping and registration of informality in the Nepalese context, the identification, verification and recordation (IVR) of the people-to-land relationship was conducted through two pilot studies using a participatory approach covering around 1500 and 3400 parcels, respectively, in an urban and a rural setting. The pilot studies were based on the FFPLA National Strategy and utilized satellite imageries and smartphones for identification and verification of land boundaries. Data collection to verification tasks were completed within seven months in the urban settlements and for an average cost of 7.5 USD per parcel; within the rural setting, the pilot study was also completed within 7 months and for an average cost of just over 3 USD per parcel. The studies also informed the discussions on building the legislative and institutional frameworks, which are now in place. With locally trained ‘grassroots surveyors’, the studies have provided a promising alternative to the conventional surveying technologies by providing a fast, inexpensive and acceptable solution. The tested approach may fulfill the commitment to resolve the countrywide mapping of informality. The use of consistent data model and mapping standards are recommended. Full article

To promote the harmonious human-land relationships and increased urban-rural interaction, rural collective-owned commercial construction land (RCOCCL) marketization reform in some pilot areas was a new attempt by the Chinese Central Government in 2015. In this areas, a novel interest distribution system was established with the land right adjustment and the corresponding local governments were likely to benefit through taxation and land appreciation adjustment fund. This study proposed the hypothesis that the RCOCCL marketization reform would improve local government revenue, and explored the actual effect based on panel census data of county-level administrative units from 2010 to 2018. We applied the difference-in-difference (DID) method to analyze the causal effect of this reform on fiscal revenue with 29 pilot areas selected as the treatment group and 1602 county-level units as the control group. The empirical results of the optimized DID robustness test models and the Heckman two-step method showed that the RCOCCL marketization reform does not have a significant impact because of lower land circulation efficiency, the transfer of land transaction costs, and the policy implementation deviations. Thus, weakening the administrative intervention of local governments in the RCOCCL marketization is essential to the land market development in China. Full article

With the economic transition and changes in the urban–rural relationships, rural revitalization has become a great political concern in China. Reforming the rural land system is considered an important prerequisite for the revitalization of the countryside as the homestead transfer can provide new land utilization space for industries. This case study of the “hollow village” (villages with abandoned houses) reconstruction of Wantang in Yiwu city, which is a homestead system reforming pilot, aims at making a detailed analysis of the specific practice of homestead transfer. It analyzes the roles and functions of the local village collective organization in the reform of homestead transfer. From the capitalization on homestead value, the effect of densification of housing, and the effect of labor resource diversification of homestead transfer, this paper analyzes how the village collective uses the policy of the “hollow village reconstruction” to realize rural revitalization and farmers’ welfare. A conclusion is that the village collective’s leadership and mobilization played an indispensable role in the process of homestead system reform. Building up industry is the key factor for the village’s revitalization. It is significant not only for the use of the homestead resource but also for creating off-farm employment. Our findings also emphasize the need for bottom-up village collective initiatives to align with top-down government policy, regional resource endowments and enterprises, to achieve rural revitalization. Full article

A new urbanization and rural revitalization strategy has been implemented in China over a number of years, under which farmers’ land contract rights (LCRs) flow inevitably through various means. The practice in reform pilot areas indicates that government funds cannot meet all the needs, so exploring market-based LCR payout paths is important for rural land tenure system reform. The purpose of this study is to answer questions such as the following: How would farmers respond if they were allowed to trade LCRs? Is there an equilibrium point between the potential supply and demand of LCRs? Which factors would affect the potential supply and demand of LCRs? In this study, 697 valid questionnaires from Ningxia, Hebei, Henan, and Shandong provinces, China, were used for analysis by the multiple bounded discrete choice (MBDC) method and MBDC-Tobit model. The results show that there is a potential market among rural collective households in China, with an equilibrium price of ¥27,800/mu ($59,714.4/ha), and a proportion of farmers who are willing to buy or sell LCRs is around 10.0%. The factors affecting the potential supply and demand of LCRs include land grade, average agricultural income per unit, total money to buy urban houses and cars, age, number of household members with a college education or above, and risk appetite. If the institutional barriers that hinder LCR transactions were eliminated, the potential supply and demand of LCRs would be matched, and the market would provide funds for next-stage reforms. Full article