Addressing the social landscape dimensions: The need for reconciling cross scale assessments for capturing Cultural Ecosystem Services (CES)

This special issue integrates eleven papers focussing on indicators able to convey the multiple expectations that society has concerning agricultural land. As scale issues have been so far overlooked within this research topic, a particular focus of this themed issue is to highlight the need for reconciling assessments across scales. The shared purpose of the contributions is to examine how the multiple societal expectations concerning agrarian landscapes might be incorporated into land use policy at different governance levels.A core set of these papers were presented in the symposium “Linking social indicators across scales”, to the European Congress of the International Association of Landscape Ecology (IALE) in September 2013 in Manchester, UK. This symposium was organized to create the time and space for a discussion on the issues of scale when capturing societal preferences concerning agrarian landscapes. While the landscape scale was specifically addressed by four papers, seven papers examined broader geographic units in addition to up-scaling and downscaling issues.     

Land use policy in China: Introduction

This themed issue of Land Use Policy builds mainly on papers presented at an international conference on ‘Land Use Issues and Policy in China under Rapid Rural and Urban Transformation’, convened by the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing, China, in October 2012. The conference set out to share and promote new scientific findings from a range of disciplines that advance research on land use policy in China. The contributions to this themed issue provide conceptual–theoretical and empirical takes on the topic, around four main areas of interest to both researchers and policymakers: nation-wide land use issues, the Sloping Land Conversion Program, land engineering and land use, and land use transitions. Various land use issues have been associated with rapid urban–rural transformations in China, giving rise to formulation of new policies directly affecting land use. However, these have contributed to new land use problems due to the nature of the policies and the difficulties in policy implementation constrained by the special ‘dual-track’ structure of urban–rural development in China. In view of this, this themed edition makes a compelling call for more systematic research into the making and implementation of China's land use policy. It also emphasizes the challenges for further research on land use policy in China.     

The tragedy of the commons: property rights and markets as solutions to resource and environmental problems

In one way or another, all environmental and natural resource problems associated with overexploitation or under provision of public goods, arise from incompletely defined and enforced property rights. As a result private decision makers do not consider or internalize social benefits and costs in their production or investment actions. The gap between private and social net returns results in externalities – harmful effects on third parties: overfishing, excessive air pollution, unwarranted extraction or diversion of ground or surface water, extreme depletion of oil and gas reservoirs. These situations are all examples of the 'The Tragedy of the Commons'. In this paper, I consider options for mitigating the losses of open access: common or group property regimes, government tax and regulation policy, more formal private property rights. I briefly summarize the problems and advantages of each option and describe why there has been move toward rights-based instruments in recent years: ITQ (individual transferable quotas), tradable emission permits, and private water rights. Introductions to the papers in the special issue follow.     

Improving drought policy: a plan of action

In September 1986 the International Symposium and Workshop on Drought was held at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in the USA. More than 150 scientists and policy makers from more than 25 drought-prone nations participated. The symposium was organized to review our current knowledge of drought and to determine what research and information is needed to improve national and international capacity to cope with drought. The physical and societal implications of drought were discussed in the context of a variety of spatial scales and socioeconomic and political settings. The aim of the workshop was to draw attention to drought as a policy issue, one that can be managed more effectively through an interdisciplinary and cooperative effort from the scientific and policy communities. The ultimate goal of the workshop was a ‘plan of action’ to facilitate drought planning efforts worldwide.     

Calendar

In September 1986 the International Symposium and Workshop on Drought was held at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in the USA. More than 150 scientists and policy makers from more than 25 drought-prone nations participated. The symposium was organized to review our current knowledge of drought and to determine what research and information is needed to improve national and international capacity to cope with drought. The physical and societal implications of drought were discussed in the context of a variety of spatial scales and socioeconomic and political settings. The aim of the workshop was to draw attention to drought as a policy issue, one that can be managed more effectively through an interdisciplinary and cooperative effort from the scientific and policy communities. The ultimate goal of the workshop was a ‘plan of action’ to facilitate drought planning efforts worldwide.     

Donning Coase‐coloured glasses: a property rights view of natural resource economics*

Economic analysis of natural resource and environmental issues inappropriately places too much emphasis on Pigouvian externalities and too little on Coasean property rights and transaction costs. The crucial questions are who has what property rights and what are the transaction costs associated with these property rights. Asserting an externality implicitly assumes a set of property rights and hence a distribution of the social costs, but it is precisely a lack of property rights that allows decision makers to ignore social costs. By viewing natural resource and environmental problems through a Coasean lens, we better focus our attention on how property rights evolve, how they influence transaction costs, and how those transaction costs affect the potential for bargaining to minimise social costs.     

Sustainability and Land tenure: Who owns the floodplain in the Pantanal,Brazil?

In seeking to achieve poverty alleviation and environmental conservation, public policy has often centred on guaranteeing land titles to local peoples. However, such approaches have brought unintended outcomes, replacing small-scale economies and natural areas by intensive exploitation of resources with no clear improvement in local people’s wellbeing. To understand this, we go beyond a general political ecology framing to consider relations between sustainability and land tenure, focusing on the intersection of economics, ecology and anthropology to understand how land tenure, property and use play out on the ground. We draw together different concepts including bundle of rights, de facto and de jure resource use, property regimes, density-dependence and non-equilibrium theory. The significance of this three-discipline view is illustrated through a case study of the Pantanal wetland, Brazil, where conservationists, the government and the local population contest ownership of the Paraguay River floodplain. Government sought to address conflicts around tenure and access through a narrow view of property, which failed to encompass the overlapping layers of land tenure, property and use on the ground and only served to create further legal battles. This article concludes that a more complex view combining the three perspectives is needed in the case of the Pantanal, and in other cases of contested property rights, in order to resolve conflicting claims and foster sustainability. We dissect both the power plays involved between different groups competing for control of a valuable resource, and the legal frameworks which can and should provide checks and balances in the system. The more nuanced grasp that emerges of local systems of tenure and access, of how these diverge from western property concepts, and of their environmental implications favours a better understanding of local realities, allowing for better management policy and consequently contributing more effectively towards poverty alleviation and environmental protection.     

Introduction: Land rights,restitution, politics,and war in Colombia

This paper introduces contributions to a symposium that report some of the findings and arguments to emerge from a collaborative research project involving five Colombian universities forming the Observatorio de Restitución y Regulación de Derechos de Propiedad Agraria (Observatory of Restitution and Regulation of Agrarian Property Rights). In a number of ways, the research presented in the symposium advances understanding of the political economy of rural Colombia, and of war in Colombia, and the papers, drawing on the original evidence collected by Observatorio researchers, develop arguments that have a wider relevance too for agrarian political economy and the understanding of violent conflict. In particular, the papers highlight the direct participation of elites in violent conflict; the varieties and nuances of wartime primitive accumulation; the complexities of the state's role in wartime agrarian political economy; the gender dimensions of agrarian conflict; the interaction of war and law; and the significance for service provision of farm size. As Colombia—hopefully—passes from long war to peace, these arguments and this evidence may be valuable in debates about what kind of peace can develop.     

情与理的耦合：精准识别的基层实践逻辑与案例分析——以江西省X县实践为例

[目的]随着精准扶贫工作的深入推进,其在运行过程中也衍生出了各种形态,致使精准识别机制在基层执行中的瞄准偏离,即基层干部对政策的变通执行。文章通过政策制度嵌入到农村社会的角度研究精准识别瞄准偏离的原因。[方法]基于江西省X县的实地调研,采用Logistics二元回归模型分析政策变通执行的影响因素。[结果]60岁以上老人数量、家庭人口数量、医疗费用支出、是否因病因灾致贫以及家中是否有残疾与基层干部对政策的变通执行具有相关性,且相对贫困家庭中年迈老人数量越多、医疗费用支出越高,基层干部将其识别为建档立卡贫困户的可能性越大。[结论]基层干部对政策的变通执行也反映了国家行政秩序受中国传统农村社会差序格局影响而产生的"情"与"理"的耦合现象。由此该文提出需进一步完善第三方评估指标体系和评估方式以及鼓励地方政府创新精准识别和资金使用机制,以期更好实现精准扶贫的战略目标。     

江苏省建设林业社会化服务体系的探讨

林业产权制度改革是一项政策性很强的工作,涉及投资、经营、管理多方权益,因而产权制度改革的进一步深化,必须靠社会化服务体系的构建来为其提供重要的外部环境。本文通过调查研究,提出了江苏林业社会化服务体系发展战略及其相应的措施和对策。     

Formalisation of land rights in the South: An overview

Formalisation of property rights has recently been proposed as a way of reducing poverty. The poor, it is said, do not lack assets, they lack only the formal, protected rights necessary to make these assets engines of entrepreneurship, thriving markets, and information networks. Historical evidence with regard to formalisation programmes is, however, mixed at best, and current universalist proposals contain numerous flaws. A more context-specific and flexible approach is needed, with greater attention to local settings and specific objectives and tools. Property formalisation should not be considered merely a technical tool but must take account of politics and culture.     

Introduction to the special issue “small farms: decline or persistence?”

This issue of Agricultural Economics contains articles from a seminar entitled “Small Farms: Decline or Persistence?” held at the University of Kent. This issue includes nine papers selected from more than 50 papers presented at the seminar. Articles published use a range of econometric and simulation methods to provide a suite of case studies. Topics studied range from such fundamental issues as what constitutes a small farm to recent trends in the diversification of small farms and their integration into modern globalized food chains. Several papers emphasize the link between agricultural policy development and the future of small farms.     

Does it Matter that we do not Agree on the Definition of Poverty? A Comparison of Four Approaches

While there is world-wide agreement on poverty reduction as an overriding goal of development policy, there is little agreement on the definition of poverty. Four approaches to the definition and measurement of poverty are reviewed in this paper: the monetary, capability, social exclusion and participatory approaches. The theoretical underpinnings of the various measures and problems of operationalizing them are pointed out. It is argued that each is a construction of reality, involving numerous judgements, which are often not transparent. The different methods have different implications for policy, and also, to the extent that they point to different people as being poor, for targeting. Empirical work in Peru and India shows that there is significant lack of overlap between the methods with, for example, nearly half the population identified as in poverty according to monetary poverty but not in capability poverty, and conversely. This confirms similar findings elsewhere. Hence, the definition of poverty does matter for poverty eradication strategies.     

Land for welfare in China

Drawing on firsthand observations, Party and government documents, and survey data, this study examines the causes and processes of the land for welfare policy in China. The implementation of the land for welfare program cannot be understood in isolation from the profound urban–rural gap in the land property rights regime and social welfare provision in China. The dual land tenure system allows local officials to generate revenue by expropriating rural land, which, to rural households, functions as a social insurance as well as an income-generating property. In the process of land requisition, land-losing villagers are provided with social welfare benefits to compensate for their loss of their land's insurance function. Such provision, however, is not developed out of the local governments’ benign intention, but their strategic reaction to the central government's development program that combines rural social welfare provision with a land rewarding system, which provides an opportunity for local officials to gain more land, a valuable asset for local governments. The provision of social welfare benefits is selective: affected rural households are provided with welfare benefits that are less costly to the local government, typically in the form of a pension insurance.     

The Governance of Rural Land in a Liberalised World

Liberalisation of agricultural policies reduces the influence of policy on land‐use decisions, but environmental policy objectives remain. Governance provides an approach that recognises the role of institutions and collective action. The formulation of environmental policy objectives in terms of the provision of public goods raises questions as to the role of economic valuation and as to whether the definition of ‘goods’ may misdirect policy attention. An alternative approach relates to ecosystem services and sees management issues in terms of ecosystem resilience and the adaptive governance of socio‐ecological systems. Governance involves a mix of regulation, markets, government incentives and collective action. Regulation sets the domain within which markets operate and social judgements as to property rights are required as a basis for exchanges. Depending on commodity prices, agri‐environment schemes may be required either to reduce agricultural production intensity or to keep land under production. The diffuse nature of the environmental benefits and costs of land uses, the complexity of ecosystems and the need to co‐ordinate land management decisions indicate a role for local adaptive co‐management of land resources. Governments play a major role in supporting the institutional framework within which this can take place.     

Special issue: Environmental risk mitigation for sustainable land use development

The Special Issue (SI) “Environmental Risk Mitigation for Sustainable Land Use Development” presents seventeen interrelated papers addressing the key concept of environmental risk mitigation and sustainable land use development. The issue argues that risk mitigation depends directly on the risk assessment analysis and the quality of applied measures. Therefore, the more precise are risk assessment conclusions, the better the risk mitigation measures would be. This collection of papers follows the vision of the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 2015–2030 (Sendai Framework) which states that the integration of sustainable development objectives into disaster risk mitigation and adaptation at all levels and at all stages of policy action are of paramount importance for the sustainability of our communities. The final purpose of the issue is to address the mutual roles of land use policy on environmental risk mitigation and adaptation, especially disaster risks.     

Evolution of land distribution in the context of development theories

Land distribution is the main core of economic development analysis. The main objectives of land distribution are the improvement of living standards in rural areas, redistribution of land by developing new land registration, redistributing income through job creation, and increasing the productivity of agricultural products. This paper discusses different land distribution programs and outlines the major demands for development theories. It delivers a review of land policies and rigorous case-studies evidence from a global perspective. It also presents a review of historical and sociopolitical literature to evaluate the trend of land distribution, agro-ecological potential of development theories, and various policy debates on land use. In addition, the paper provides a coherent review of case studies to analyze different development theories regarding the concept of land distribution. This paper concludes that development theories support multiple understandings of property rights, including community and policy debates regarding poverty alleviation in poor regions. Moreover, it conceptualized that development theories are urgently needed to prevent people from being driven out of their land. However, it is unlikely that land distribution is the most efficient policy and political framework in contexts. Therefore, traditional land distribution programs need to be revised considering development theories.     

Incomplete privatization of public rental housing in Hong Kong

The delineation of the land occupied by Public Rental Housing (PRH) is a contentious issue in worldwide debates over PRH privatization. Heated arguments hold that governments should retain the occupied land for mitigating inequalities that privatization might provoke. Dual-role policies arise concerning both efficiency and equality. This research seeks to decode actual consequences of such policies based on their implementation in Hong Kong, with a specific focus on the Tenants Purchase Scheme (TPS). Intended to enliven PRH within needy families, the TPS policy instead resulted in dormant resale of privatized PRH with adverse effects on target groups. Hypotheses on how the TPS policy has affected housing resale are developed based on property rights and searching theories and tested against empirical data. This research offers a theoretical basis for exploring solutions to the unanticipated aftermath of Hong Kong’s PRH privatization and provides information for other governments on implications of privatization strategies.     

江苏林木种苗科技产业化服务体系的建立

林木种苗科技产业化是林业发展进程中一项重要的工作,涉及到产前、产中、产后多个领域,必须靠社会化服务体系的构建来为其提供重要的外部环境。通过对林业种苗科技产业化服务体系建立的必要性以及建立林木种苗科技产业化中社会化服务体系所面临的问题的研究,提出了建设江苏林木种苗科技产业化的社会化服务体系应采取的措施和对策。