Abstract: With the deepening of China's macroeconomic reforms, promoting the coordinated reform of collective forest tenure system ( CFTS) has become society's consensus on the reform of collective forestry. Therefore the analysis on the institutional change of CFTS is significant for clarifying the direction for coordinated reform of CFTS and deepening the macroeconomic reform in whole society. In this paper, the process of institutional change of CFTS was divided into four periods based on the property characteristics. And the economic motivation in four periods was systematically analyzed by economic methods. Results are: first, the direction of each previous change is closely related to China's temporal economy and social environment; secondly, the essence of each previous change is the combination of the nation's institutional arrangement based on macroeconomic optimization and farmers'micro-rational choices under such arrangement; thirdly, successful implementation of institutional change results from the agreement between macroscopic institutional arrangement and microcosmic rational choices.