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.Footnote 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,Footnote 2 while the social and environmental consequences of rangeland parcelization stoke debate,Footnote 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.Footnote 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 substantially from prevailing pictures of CFTR. The reform did not apportion forests among households. Rather, most communities in the area had been compelled by township forestry authorities to collectivize forests that had been allocated to households in the 1980s.Footnote 5 Nonetheless, in practice, residents continue to cling to household forests. At the same time, new restrictions on tree harvesting have been implemented, but with a leniency that allows people to obtain firewood. These observations raise two questions. First, why did forest tenure reform take a different direction from that given in public accounts? Second, how do we best understand discrepancies between official allocation of tenure and the actual practice of rural residents and officials? We argue that these discrepancies emerge from local governments' responses to a situation that requires producing policy outputs while avoiding social disruption. The need to satisfy conflicting priorities leads officials to implement formal arrangements that allow policy payments to proceed, while informally sanctioning practices that deviate from official pronouncements.
At an earlier point, Peter Ho described a pattern of “deliberate institutional ambiguity” surrounding land ownership, within which the agents of state ownership and the identity of the rural collective – owners of state and collective land, respectively – were left undefined. These choices served to contain conflicts over land ownership – ideal conflicts between ideology and practice as well as material conflicts among land claimants.Footnote 6 We uncover a different form of ambiguity, one that arises from efforts to clarify property rights. While the subjects and contents of formal tenure are clarified, discrepancies arise between de jure categories and de facto practice. Required to deliver surveyed forests and forest compensation payments, local officials imposed formal tenure arrangements contrary to residents' preferences; however, they have tolerated the informal access practices that allow people to obtain forest products their livelihoods require.Footnote 7 We call this pattern accommodative buffering. Accommodative buffering allows administrative arrangements and ecological compensation measures associated with CFTR to go forward while preventing social disruptions.
Collective Forest Tenure Reform: Visions and Impacts
China's forestland is divided into state forests and collective forests, which respectively comprise about 40 per cent and 60 per cent of total forestland area.Footnote 8 In most rural communities, forestland ownership lies with the “collective economic organization” (jiti jingji zuzhi 集体经济组织). In 1981, the central government promulgated the “three fixes,” which allocated use rights in community forests and ownership of trees among resident households, along similar lines to the Household Contract Responsibility System that individualized farmland use rights. Collective forests could be portioned into contracted “responsibility hills” (zerenshan 责任山), while households were authorized to claim and plant trees on uncultivated land as “freehold hills” (ziliushan 自留山). Widespread deforestation followed in some regions as farmers rushed to harvest timber. The authorities backtracked, and many forests were recollectivized.Footnote 9 Following drought and flood events in 1997 and 1998, state authorities redoubled forest conservation and restoration efforts, implementing a ban on commercial logging first in state forests and later in collective forests under the Natural Forest Protection Programme.
In 2003, following the State Forestry Administration's “Decision on accelerating forestry development,”Footnote 10 a pilot programme for CFTR was launched in Jiangxi and Fujian provinces. By 2008, several provinces had undertaken forest tenure reforms, and with a State Council directive the policy went nationwide.Footnote 11 The “Opinions on comprehensively advancing reform of the collective forest tenure system” stated a goal of improving forest management incentives by giving individuals rights to manage, benefit from, and rent out forest plots. At its core, CFTR “brings management rights to collective land and tree ownership to households, establishing the status of the household as managing agent. It is an expansion and extension of the rural household contract management system from cropland to forests.”Footnote 12 By giving households clear and individualized rights, central authorities intend to spur residents to manage forests for production and for environmental protection. Markets for forest use rights are to put forestland in the hands of people who will manage them efficiently, thereby increasing forestry production, raising rural incomes, improving environments and ensuring social harmony.
Even as CFTR policy stresses individualizing and marketizing collective forest management, it also sanctions voluntary choice and allows rural collectives to adopt collective tenure. Two collectivized alternatives are permitted: (1) maintaining collective management while granting households ownership in a shareholding arrangement, and (2) collective management with benefits evenly distributed across households. Collectives were to decide democratically which arrangement to adopt, with open deliberation followed by a two-thirds majority vote of the village representative body. Forestry agencies would survey forest boundaries and issue forest tenure certificates on the basis of these surveys. Use-rights contracts would be extended for a period of 30 to 70 years, with rights to lease or rent, mortgage, and bequeath a plot.Footnote 13 In spite of the allowance for collective forms, policy statements emphatically favour household divisions of forest rights, putting stress on ensuring households' rights to economic benefits from contracted forests.
These benefits include compensation for forest ecological benefits (senlin shengtai xiaoyi buchang 森林生态效益补偿, hereafter termed “forest compensation”). The logic of forest compensation echoes that of payments for environmental services (PES), which are becoming increasingly prevalent in international environmental management circles.Footnote 14 Proponents of PES label the benefits that forests and other ecosystems generate, like erosion control and carbon sequestration, “environmental services.” They claim that land users will be more likely to manage land in ways that maintain these services if they receive incentives in the form of payments from beneficiaries of the services. In this picture, making payments to effectively incentivize environmentally friendly land uses depends on specifying land users responsible for services that are delivered, so that payments can be made conditional on land management. If a parcel gains or maintains forest cover, its owner can be rewarded, while an owner of a plot that is clear-cut can be denied payment. Ecological compensation in China operates broadly on this logic. For example, under the Returning Farmland to Forest Programme (tuigenghuanlin gongcheng 退耕还林工程), millions of households have received compensation for retiring erosion-prone farmland and for planting trees. However, this and related programmes are not canonical PES programmes because they are state-mediated and explicitly prioritize goals other than balancing environmental service supply and demand, such as poverty alleviation and regional economic rebalancing. But the principle of targeted payments to environmental service providers remains central. Hence, in policy statements, forest compensation depends on allotting tenure rights to specified actors.Footnote 15
Studies of CFTR thus far have found uneven outcomes. First, locales vary on the extent to which individual or collective arrangements are adopted.Footnote 16 A nationwide study found that in sampled provinces, by 2006, while individualized forest rights showed net expansion, this expansion was small, and only 7 per cent of the area of collectively managed forests had been transferred to other management types.Footnote 17 Subsequent findings of slowdowns and reversions to collective management suggest that the initial shift may have been inflated owing to pressures to demonstrate that goals of individualizing tenure were being met.Footnote 18 It appears that communities are slower to adopt individualized tenure than policymakers expected.
Second, where tenure rights have been parcelled out, the extent to which this has brought economic benefits and facilitated market circulation of forest rights is uneven. Shares of household income from forest products and tree crops rose broadly from 2006 to 2011.Footnote 19 However, weak access to credit prevents people from investing in forests, while off-farm work often draws them away from forest management.Footnote 20 Rural residents are eager to rent in forestland, but supply is short, as many are loath to rent theirs out.Footnote 21 In some regions, the monopoly of timber markets by local traders and an inability to access the timber quota prevent most households from capitalizing on individualized forests. While they have secure rights to forests, these residents are unable to realize benefits.Footnote 22
Case studies show CFTR yielding intended results in some locales, but also reveal many instances of resistance and malfeasance. A study of sites in Fujian and Jiangxi found that residents generally approved of tenure allocation to households, but forest property markets and sustainable management efforts had yet to realize their promise.Footnote 23 Another study in Fujian found residents creatively turning individualizing reforms into a collective effort to redistribute access to land and income from bamboo cultivation.Footnote 24 In contrast, officials in a county in Jiangxi resisted distributing forests among households because of coordination challenges and the potential for conflict. Households rejected the eligibility criteria for collective membership and the mapped boundaries forestry authorities proposed.Footnote 25 In Guangxi, “circulation” of forest rights took the form of thousands of villagers being compelled to transfer forestland rights to firms on disadvantageous terms.Footnote 26 In Baoshan 保山, Yunnan, CFTR brought collectivized tenure that a village with a history of collective forestry used to advance community welfare, while another village found it an unwelcome imposition.Footnote 27 The uneven realization of goals of privatizing tenure and promoting forestland markets challenges us to examine the mechanics of implementation to see what CFTR achieves and how.
That CFTR should have uneven manifestations is unsurprising. Policy prescriptions commonly come into tension with one another and with local practices, and these tensions yield divergent and creative local implementation responses.Footnote 28 The alternatives presented in policy statements make it clear that communities were granted flexibility to implement collectivized arrangements. Indeed, in several provinces collective tenure may govern over 30 per cent of collective forests.Footnote 29 Given the preoccupation with individualized tenure in policy statements and research literature, examining how and why communities adopt collective tenure provides a useful corrective. Beyond that contribution, this study raises substantive questions about how street-level officials manage tensions among policy goals presented by CFTR. The central puzzles are, first, why the local government persisted with collectivized tenure despite opposition, and second, how and why actual access patterns diverged from these collectivized tenure rights and associated use restrictions.
Stabilizing Forests through Accommodative Buffering
These questions invite an investigation into how officials and residents perform the work of stabilizing forests and stabilizing communities. Collective forest tenure reform is coupled to an ambitious programme through which central authorities propose to parcel the entire country's territory into spatial units designated for particular land covers and land uses, managed rationally to yield social, economic and environmental benefits. Forest compensation, Key Ecosystem Function Zones, ecological red lines, and various other programmes and targets operationalize these aims.Footnote 30 Such projects require that areas of territory defined as forest (and other categories) be stabilized and made into persistent entities, so that mapped categories and numerical quotas have steady referents and associated policies can proceed accordingly. Land units are defined as forest, and people are assigned to manage them for defined policy outputs. Local forestry agents are responsible for keeping those lands under whatever kind of forest planning processes have defined as appropriate. These “bureaucratic forests” coexist in tension with “cultural forests” – the forests of manifold use and meaning that residents live in and use – that occupy the same spaces: “The bureaucrats impose their schemes and their measures on a cultural landscape already there, and the local people adapt their own livelihoods and landscapes to the realities of the policies imposed from above.”Footnote 31 Failing to encompass cultural forests, top-down forest stabilization projects often yield unintended consequences.
These local adaptations could present implementation failures. Where policy implementation diverges from prescriptions, analysts typically start from how policy attributes meet with the motivations of local officials. Incentives embedded in the cadre evaluation system motivate officials to implement “hard” policies, with easily measured indicators connected to rewards and sanctions, over “soft” goals attached to diffuse targets or weak incentives.Footnote 32 Local implementation tracks central state principals' continual manoeuvring to make local state agents realize principals' aims. Many goals are practically difficult to measure, and the use of proxies can bring goal displacement as agents focus on the indicator rather than the underlying concern.Footnote 33 As central authorities put mounting weight on preventing social unrest, the imperative of “stability maintenance,” often in tension with other goals, has impelled officials to coax residents' consent or cooperation using strategies that avoid outright coercion.Footnote 34
These dynamics help explain but are not sufficient for understanding how community officials negotiate land policy implementation. First, an approach centred on cadre evaluation pertains to officials who have prospects of advancing in the formal state and Party hierarchies. However, village and community officials have scant prospects in county bureaucratic hierarchies. While these officials must report to township and county superiors, they are constantly mindful of the social and moral claims their neighbours can make on them.Footnote 35
Second, biophysical features constrain measurement and implementation. Central directives make maintaining vegetation cover a hard policy, with binding targets for forest cover and timber volume in the 12th and 13th five-year plans. Yet these criteria – themselves difficult to measure, even with improving remote sensing techniques – omit the canopy structures and biotic communities that compose forests and support human uses. Absent from targets, these aspects evade measurement. Moreover, mapping and allocating forests in rugged, densely vegetated areas is operationally difficult, even before one considers complex patterns of human activity in forests where useful things are unevenly distributed. Likewise, high transportation costs and often low biological productivity in mountainous terrains make it difficult to accomplish individualized allocation and market circulation of forest parcels.
Finally, rural residents use forests within “moral ecologies,” that is, collections of social norms about who has what rights and responsibilities with regard to the plants and animals in the landscapes they inhabit.Footnote 36 Where rules intended to enhance cover and timber volume neglect the ways residents use forests, violating moral ecologies, they may provoke resistance. Hence, these norms constrain officials charged with directing resource use.
Principal-agent and bureaucratic forest perspectives both present strategic opposition between state authorities and local actors. But officials' efforts to produce bureaucratic outputs and residents' efforts to live within landscapes often meet in negotiations that can be less antagonistic. Examining forest management in Mexico, Andrew Mathews argues that forest users and local officials collude with state bureaucrats to produce official presentations of forests that diverge from actual forest condition and use. The paper trail of official statistics maintains presentations of effective forest management. Meanwhile, officials secure forest users' cooperation by selectively accommodating local harvesting and fuelwood gathering practices.Footnote 37 Rather than showing weakness in state projects, such practices are essential to make these projects proceed amid social and environmental complexity far from administrative centres.
Similar settlements typify the pattern of “accommodative buffering” we identify in CFTR implementation. Accommodative buffering couples formal arrangements to achieve policy outputs with informal practices to maintain social stability. In the study locale, surveying complex forests posed operational difficulties, while parcelling forests out among households threatened to raise conflicts over boundaries and access. Collectivizing forest tenure rights allayed these challenges. To stabilize bureaucratic forests, state authorities instituted formal rules and practices that facilitate mapping forests, implementing new administrative arrangements and distributing forest compensation. With forests surveyed, formal rights specified and forest stewards hired, government agencies can proceed with forest payments and forestry policy administration through community forest stewards. Local officials implement formal arrangements to produce policy outputs on the basis of which their performance is evaluated. These practices in turn generate the statistics that county and provincial governments use to demonstrate implementation, and which in aggregate allow the State Forestry Administration to claim that in 2014, 14.9 billion yuan in ecological compensation payments ensured the protection of 1.39 billion mu of forest.Footnote 38 Concurrently, with social stability in mind, local agencies tolerate informal practices that contain the trouble sparked by poorly fitted formal institutions. In everyday practice, community forests are governed within moral ecologies that entitle residents to the firewood and fodder that their livelihoods require. Top-down implementation enables local forestry agencies to fulfil their responsibility to stabilize forests administratively, while allowing residents and forest stewards to work out actual practices serves as a safety-valve, stabilizing communities.
Such accommodations are not unique to forest tenure reforms. They reflect a larger family of practices through which local officials struggle to achieve performance criteria while maintaining local power bases and avoiding unrest.Footnote 39 A similar dynamic is at play in land swaps that transform rural housing land into farmland to free up quotas for peri-urban construction. Behind crisp zonations on maps hide social and biophysical deviations that officials manage, accommodate, or suppress.Footnote 40 Implementing the Returning Farmland to Forest Programme, residents and officials often relied on informal measures to get trees planted and maintain compensation flows.Footnote 41 Principal-agent concerns surrounding corruption and perverse incentives are not absent. But, as Alex Wang has noted regarding pollution control, stability maintenance is as salient in China's environmental policies as environmental outcomes themselves.Footnote 42 Slippage between presentation and practice reflects the buffering efforts local officials undertake to handle conflicting priorities.
Setting and Methods
Our study took place in Weixi 维西 county, in the rugged country of north-west Yunnan province, whose plant endemism and geological features have won it a designation as a Biodiversity Hotspot and Key Ecological Function Zone. According to official statistics, forest cover in the county was 75 per cent in 2009. Weixi is a peripheral area, consistently appearing on lists of national-level poverty counties. Most residents are categorized in the officially recognized Lisu, Naxi, Bai and Tibetan nationalities. Up until the 1980s, residents practised combinations of settled and swidden (also labelled “slash-and-burn”) subsistence farming. Since then, swidden has been curtailed, and large areas of marginal cropland have been afforested or abandoned, while residents have switched to farming mostly maize on the remaining cropland. Many have begun cultivating walnuts, runner beans, and various medicinal plants as cash crops, and raising livestock to sell. As the road network has reached nearly every settlement, commercial agriculture and off-farm labour have grown in importance. Residents continue to rely on forests for timber, firewood and fodder.
We undertook a study of livelihoods and resource use in 12 communities in two adjacent townships of Weixi county. Aiming to span any variation in livelihood patterns and environmental conditions, we selected communities close to and distant from township centres, located from the banks of the Lancang River 澜沧江 to several kilometres uphill. During three months in 2014, we facilitated focus group discussions and conducted 81 semi-structured interviews with residents, community leaders, forest stewards, and county and township forestry personnel. These discussions and interviews concerned how people use forests, how CFTR was undertaken, and other aspects of community life and household livelihoods. The 12 focus groups included six adult residents each, three male and three female, ranging in age from their 20s to their 60s. Results from a questionnaire survey of all households present, 419 of 500 registered households, addressing livelihood activities and forest use, complement interview and focus group observations.Footnote 43
Reform and Reversion
With decollectivization, communities in the Lancang River valley allocated collective forests among households. Each household received an area proportional to household size. Residents recall demarcating household forest boundaries based on landscape features: ridges, rocks, streams. Over the next two decades, households collected timber and firewood in their own plots while gathering other forest products more broadly. With growing income from off-farm work, cash crops and anti-poverty programmes, many families built new houses, primarily using trees from household forests. As households aged and subdivided, some divided their forests. In other cases, adult siblings would share a single plot. When childless elderly people died, their forests would revert to the collective. These actions created a patchwork of forests belonging to single households, multiple households, and collectives.
In 2009, county and township forestry personnel implemented CFTR, recruiting community officials to track through forests surveying boundaries. Village and community meetings ratified decisions about tenure formalization. Two outcomes appeared that current presentations of CFTR would lead one not to expect. First, CFTR yielded formally recognized collective forest areas, not household plots. Second, residents preserved forest use patterns centred on access to household forests.
Formal Re-Collectivization
In all 12 communities, forest tenure was formally collectivized. Rather than apportion collective forests into parcels to which households would retain use rights, local forestry agencies surveyed community forest boundaries and issued forest tenure certificates (linquanzheng 林权证) at the level of the community. For each community, the surveyed forest was made into one or two sections. The township forestry station issued the tenure certificate for each section to the community chief (shezhang 社长) if there was one section, or one each to the community chief and accountant if there were two. In some cases, forestlands were collectivized at the time of initial CFTR implementation. In others, township forestry stations directed collectivization several years after the initial forest survey had been made on the basis of household forest divisions. In each case, the decision was a top-down process. Township forestry personnel consulted with village leaders and presented schemes for villager approval. In most cases, in a meeting of the villager small group, the motion passed without challenge.
Why collectivize when the general thrust of CFTR is to individualize holdings? Officials emphasized that the boundaries of household forests were unclear or forgotten, and demarcating them raised disputes. A community chief recounted:
We had to have a meeting. It was decided in the [administrative] village. After the leaders went, they spent a day dividing forests up. They couldn't divide them up … Before, every household had stone markers, but after ten years no one knew where they were. We all went into the forest, one person from every household, but people couldn't find the markers. When we couldn't divide them up, the forestry bureau above said, you can collectivize. (cc 211)
Collectivizing simplified surveying and avoided conflict. Community officials asserted that residents were prone to “make trouble” (luan 乱) over household forest boundaries.
What changes did collectivizing community forests bring? Among residents, two responses predominated: (1) now we have a forest steward; and (2) now there are forest compensation payments. A typical answer to the question of why forests were collectivized went thus:
There is public benefit forest (gongyilin 公益林) compensation, so we have to manage them collectively. [Why did compensation necessitate collective management?] (laugh) It's mainly the government. The forestry station planned (guihua 规划) for collective management, and they hired a forest steward. (h12119)
Forest stewards bring forest policy implementation directly into rural communities. Before CFTR, each administrative village hired one forest guard (hulinyuan 护林员) to oversee forests belonging to every community in the village and coordinate forestry policy implementation. With CFTR, each village also hired several forest stewards (senlin guanhuyuan 森林管护员), charging them with patrolling community forests, enforcing forest rules, and supervising forestry projects. They also join the village forest guard in monthly patrols of the village's forests and adjacent state forest. In some cases, this was added to the duties of the community chief. In others, the villager small group elected a separate individual. This position manifests the tension involved in using grassroots personnel: forest stewards are responsible for implementing central policy but are also motivated to maintain amicable relationships with neighbours they are required to regulate.
The other common refrain was that forests were surveyed and collectivized “to facilitate issuing forest compensation” (yibian fa senlin buchang 以便发森林补偿, cc123). Following CFTR, every household in each community is entitled to an annual forest compensation payment. The annual payment ranges from 8 yuan per person (averaging 30–40 yuan per household) in the most densely populated community to 900 yuan per household in a ridgetop community with large collective forests. While forests are not allocated to households, household shares of the right to compensation for collective forests are to be fixed for 70 years in a manner analogous to how forest plots are fixed where tenure is individualized. Respondents could not name a situation in which these payments might be withheld for forest mismanagement. For most, the amount is too small to be an effective incentive. In all but two communities, the average amount per household in 2013 was 400 yuan or less, under 4 per cent of the median reported income of 10,250 yuan among survey respondents. While officially touted as a PES instrument, in practice forest compensation payments do not work like one. Still, they depend on the administrative linking of households to collective forests.
Maintaining Access
According to policy statements, tenure rules, forest stewards and compensation are intended to shape the quantity and quality of forests by influencing how residents use those forests. This point raises the question of how CFTR and related measures have affected forest access and use. By stressing access as the effective ability to benefit from a resource, we recognize that claims validated by property rights conferred by CFTR may not match actual forest use practices. Notably, many residents continue to recognize the household forest plots that collectivization nullified, particularly for timber and firewood harvest. Other uses appear to be outside the ambit of policies whose single-minded focus on trees of certain sorts obscures the other things that make up forests.
Timber
Of all forest resources, state authorities regulate timber the most tightly.Footnote 44 The prohibition of commercial timber sales under the Natural Forest Protection Programme had no direct effect on these communities. The state forestry firms responsible for the bulk of commercial harvests did not operate in the vicinity, and the lack of transportation infrastructure at the time prevented a market in small-scale timber from emerging. Timber for housing has been the main target of regulation. Historically, most residents lived in one-story log cabins made entirely of wood. A household head who wishes to build a house must submit for approval a proposal specifying the amount of wood to be harvested and the location where it will be cut. Between 2006 and 2011, permit requirements were suspended, and households received support for building new homes under the Comfortable Housing Programme (anju gongcheng 安居工程).Footnote 45 Respondents recounted that this burst of construction consumed all the “big trees” in community forests. Afterwards, timber regulations were reinstated. A limited number of households are permitted to build houses each year. Made of cinderblocks, mortar and tiles on wood frames, newer homes require less timber than earlier cabins. Residents report that the end of the construction boom and the switch in materials have reduced their use of timber, allowing forests to recover.
Non-timber products and grazing
Wood is far from the only material residents obtain from forests. In nearly all households, each autumn women rake up fallen pine needles, which are used as bedding in livestock pens and then composted with manure for fertilizer. Following the housing construction boom, pine needles had grown scarce, although by 2014 supplies were recovering. Some residents harvest bamboo poles for basketry and bean cultivation. A minority also gather mushrooms and medicinal plants for household consumption and sale. Finally, households graze pigs, cattle, goats and sheep in forested areas. In no study site did residents limit access to any of these resources to a household's forests. Rather, as long as they did not damage trees, community members could range at will through their own and others' forests for non-timber products, fodder and pine needles.
Firewood
While they have increasing access to electric ranges and heaters, community residents continue to use firewood for warmth, cooking, and heating livestock feed. Firewood comes in three categories: dry firewood (ganchai 干柴), miscellaneous firewood (zamuchai 杂木柴), and pine (songchai 松柴). Dry wood is any wood from dead or fallen trees. People are allowed to gather it freely. Miscellaneous wood comes from trees and shrubs that are not pine or other protected species (such as yew). Pine firewood comes from harvesting standing pine trees. Around the time of CFTR implementation, township forestry stations began prohibiting the felling of pine trees for firewood. Forest stewards are directed to monitor and report pine harvesting, and to fine repeat violators. As a result, residents seek dry firewood and miscellaneous firewood where they are available. In two communities, residents buy firewood from uphill communities, displacing the issue. Riverside residents gather driftwood. In several communities, officials have secured subsidies for solar water heaters, which reduce firewood demand, or richer households have installed them on their own. But, in most cases, these alternatives are insufficient. As one resident said:
Even if we're not allowed to cut down trees, we still have to cut them down to cook our meals and make pig fodder. People who say they don't cut down trees are faking it. If they tried to fine us they would never finish collecting all the fines … If we don't cut down any trees … we still have to cook and feed our pigs … Not cutting any is impossible, and if we use up all the brush we have to cut pines. (h21231)
In upland communities, residents may go up to state forests to find firewood. In others, residents harvest a pine tree here and there within the collective forest.
In practice, forest stewards and forest guards exercise leniency, allowing residents to access the wood they need. Several reported allowing residents in need to harvest a few trees. One forest steward explained:
If someone from the community cuts down just two or three trees, I don't report them. If they were to cut down 20 or 30 trees, then I would have to make a report. But if someone from another village cuts down even one tree, I have to report it. For people within the village, someone would have to cut down five or six trees before I would file a report. (h22320)
Forest stewards presented this as a necessary measure to ensure that people's needs were met. Residents in several communities confirmed such arrangements. In some, residents are allowed to harvest one or two pines before the spring festival. In others, restrained pine harvest can occur whenever needed. People are generally free to cut pines that grow crooked. In every community's forests, there was evidence of recent harvesting – stumps, piles of wood, and pine trees with bark cut open for sappy fire-starter wood.
The Pine Fixation
Concern about pine trees in firewood management reflects a broader preoccupation with pine. In management practices and directives, local forest agencies focus on pine, particularly Yunnan pine, the dominant species. Residents consistently reported that they could harvest trees regularly before 2009, but since then, harvesting pines has been banned. As one put it, “There are no other rules governing the forest, only that you cannot cut other households' pine trees.” In two communities, in response to an infestation by an insect pest, a township forestry station organized residents to spray pine forests with insecticide. In other locales, residents have been recruited to prune lower branches of pine trees to encourage growth. These actions, along with the allowance for harvesting crooked pines, suggest that these agencies are managing these stands with an eye towards fostering straight, thick trees for future timber harvest.
There is an apparent discrepancy between the formal restrictions on pine trees and the lenience people report in practice. Nonetheless, the overall tenor of respondents' accounts conveyed a conflicted and alienated relationship with the pine forests that surround their homes. On one hand, pines remain a source of fertilizer, and to some extent, fuelwood that is vital in daily life. On the other hand, pine trees are an object of restriction and monitoring by the state. Residents hear a constant refrain: you are forbidden to fell trees heedlessly (luankanlanfa 乱砍滥伐). One described the situation bluntly:
In their freehold forests, people pretty much only plant walnut trees, usually together with corn. If they don't plant corn, it will turn into collective forest. Pine trees belong to the state (songshu shuyu guojia 松树属于国家). (cc112)
As long as this respondent's plot remained a walnut grove, he could obtain material benefits from it. He feared that if succession replaced these trees with native vegetation, it would lead to re-designation as collective forest. If pine takes over, state restrictions on pine extraction will apply. Places where pines grow have become less accessible than they were in the past – not because they are harder to get to, but because their use is subject to surveillance. Use restrictions in effect make pine forests a dominion of the state. At the same time, the selective harvest of other tree species may cause these forests to become biologically impoverished.Footnote 46
Collective Forests without Collective Management
The formal collectivization of forests did not appreciably change actual access patterns. When asked about the impacts of CFTR, respondents focused on forest guards, forest compensation and pine restrictions – not altered access that might follow from changed tenure rights. Communities continue to maintain pre-existing rules:
Everyone has to protect their forests. Everyone managing their own forests makes for collective management. Now it's called collective forest, but people still manage their own plots … Compensation is divided up collectively. They said that it will be added up together and divided up, but you still have to manage your own forest. People can get pine needles and dry firewood anywhere; you are just responsible for preventing tree harvest. (h22315)
Another resident accentuated this point, saying that “because the whole community only has one forest, so forests are managed collectively, but every household's boundaries are very clear” (s22245). Within these boundaries, households are primarily responsible for safeguarding pine trees:
To get miscellaneous wood you can go into other people's forests, and they will not take issue with it. It's mainly not cutting pine trees. You take care of the pine trees on your own mountain. (h22214)
Not everyone has stuck to their household forests, though. The formal change in tenure rights has introduced ambiguity in practice, in some cases resulting in disagreements over who should access what areas:
Now that they are no longer divided, [household boundaries] don't matter. Other people go into our forests, and we can go into other people's forests … But in our village some people still watch their own forests and don't let other people go in. They don't let other people cut trees, and they don't let other people rake pine needles … So I can't avoid doing the same. Everyone watches their forests this way. (h22307)
Communities manage these issues in different ways. One, with extensive and easily accessible forests, applies household forest boundaries not just to pine trees but also to deadwood, miscellaneous wood and pine needles. At the other extreme, residents of a densely populated community, whose nearby forests had been heavily impacted by use, said household forest boundaries are only loosely regarded.
The formal collectivization of forest rights has not been matched with a collectivization of access. One respondent called this arrangement “collective forests without collective management” (wu jiti guanli de jitilin 无集体管理的集体林; s22220). As several respondents noted, the rationale for collectivizing forests has been to facilitate allocating compensation. Formally, forest compensation payments are conditional on effective forest management. In practice, no one we interviewed could recall a provision for withholding these payments if forest management failed. The de jure category of collectivized forest coexists with persisting de facto differentiated access with household-based management of trees. This is not to say that realizing formal goals is completely decoupled from the material state of forests. Forestry officials do respond to flagrant transgressions. However, there is room for practices that are not reflected in official presentations of CFTR.
Conclusion
China's forest policies aim to make forests yield valued products and environmental functions and to achieve administrative outputs that make forests manageable. Securing these outcomes requires stabilizing forests and communities. In land designated for specific covers and functions, land use, vegetation and tenure allocation must be stable enough for administrative categories to hold and programmes to be implemented. To secure cooperation with specific policies and to avoid unrest in line with broader stability-maintenance mandates, officials must attune their efforts to residents' concerns. With CFTR, central authorities propose to achieve land management goals through marketized forest production enabled by private and exchangeable rights to forestland, guided by incentives that promote conservation. In practice, the complexities of landscapes and the practices and norms of people dwelling in those landscapes encumber these instruments.
In Weixi county, authorities responded with accommodative buffering practices. They dealt with the challenges of topography by adopting collective formal tenure definitions. Collective options in CFTR policies enabled surveying and allocating payments without inciting conflicts over forest boundaries. This expedient buffered challenges posed by parcelling out forests, enabling management and payment schemes to proceed. However, it ran athwart residents' moral ecology of forest use. To avert unrest on this front, local state agents have accommodated differentiated access and resource use practices.
As state authorities formalize and specify laws and regulations, accommodative buffering may be taking the place of deliberate institutional ambiguity as a mode of resolving mismatch among state priorities around land use. Even as the general definition of the rural collective remains ambiguous, the social units to which rights surrounding land parcels pertain have been specified. Forest boundaries have been mapped out, and tenure certificates have been issued. The clarification of formal rights has displaced institutional ambiguity to the space between formal rights and informal access.
This incongruity between formal and actual begets new challenges. Accommodative buffering strategies are not a fool-proof way to avoid disruption. In some cases, as formal collectivization jostles with the uneven, informal retention of household claims, residents have become less clear about who can use which forests for what. In one community, a faction of residents has clamoured for forest rights to be reallocated among households. Invoking official policy statements, they argue that households must have excludable rights to forest plots in order to make them more economically productive. Tensions among policies and between policy and practice make fuel for disputes, necessitating ongoing efforts at stability maintenance.Footnote 47
Whether accommodative buffering predominates in land management and other domains depends on how sharply high-priority policy outputs impinge on residents' lives. The accommodations we observed in Weixi were possible because the key policy outputs, forest cover and tenure documentation, left room for adjustment around actual forest access. Where implementation priorities demand interventions that burden residents and there is less room for manoeuvre, authorities must push rather than accommodate. For example, in peri-urban land consolidation and hydropower displacement, working out an alternative that allows people to stay where they are is seldom an option. Negotiation is limited to the terms of resettlement. In these cases, authorities are more likely to engage residents in bargaining, co-optation and bureaucratic absorption, channelling grievances into administrative settlement procedures.Footnote 48 Accommodative buffering is likely when policy outputs leave “slack” for adjustment to practices.
What does this mean for forests and the people who use them? First of all, access patterns and management practices in forests across China are more diverse even than initial evaluations of CFTR suggest. Despite this intensive effort to clarify forest rights, actual changes and continuities of forest use cannot reliably be read off of compilations of formal tenure designations. To adequately address the nature and consequences of these reforms will require joining careful study of forests using remote sensing and field methods with close attention to the ways people work out forest management in rural communities. Second, whether collectives or households obtain tenure rights, and whether or not formal rights and actual access converge, state priorities for forests continue to constrain forest users in ways that alienate them from the landscapes they dwell in. Regulating land use for public interests in environmental values is necessary amid pressures to exploit landscapes. This necessity poses the challenge of balancing regulation with enablement in ways that engage rural dwellers as participants in forest conservation and support people who continue to maintain land-based livelihoods.
In these locales, accommodative buffering has contained some of the liabilities that CFTR presents. But it raises thorny questions concerning what happens if the safety-valve of informal arrangements blows. The recent nationwide crackdown on corruption shows authorities invoking formal rules to punish behaviours that had previously been tolerated to the extent that they had come to constitute informal institutions.Footnote 49 Many commentators claim that such enforcement is selective. Since under authoritarian rule by law, formal institutions serve as a backstop for achieving political aims,Footnote 50 the toleration of informal arrangements leaves the people who survive through those practices vulnerable, as they will bear the consequences of any shakedown.
Acknowledgements
This research was conducted under a Science, Engineering, and Education for Sustainability Fellowship from the US National Science Foundation, award number SMA-1415028. The authors wish to thank Julia Chuang and Shrey Kapoor for helpful critiques and to recognize support from the Institute at Brown for Environment and Society at Brown University.
Biographical Notes
John Aloysius Zinda is assistant professor of development sociology at Cornell University. He studies how people in rural communities respond to environmental and developmental interventions, and the consequences for social and ecological change, with a focus on land management in south-west China.
Zhiming Zhang is an associate professor and assistant dean of the School of Ecology and Environmental Science at Yunnan University. His research examines how social and ecological factors influence land cover change.
