Increase Efficiency and Keep Equity: Some Thoughts on Deepening Collective Forestry Tenure Reform Based on“Four Schools of Tenure Right”

With the aims of providing suggestions for policy makers, the paper firstly briefs main progress of collective forest tenure reform on the basis of literature review. Then, it introduces opinions of the “four schools of tenure right” toward forest, discusses and proposes recommendations for the policies of China’s current collective forest tenure reform. It is found that, even though there is no universal reform pattern, the “four schools of tenure right” do discover some laws of forest tenure reform of developing countries which could shed light to China’s current collective forest tenure reform. Comparing with other schools, the property right school has impacted Chinese forestry the most as clarifying forest tenure and increasing efficiency have always been goals of the reform. The school of agrarian structure explicitly points out that market regulation may promote tenure security and that protection of farmer’s right is fundamental. The school of institutionalist emphasizes the role of government in the reform and suggest building rules of a political and legal system to consolidate reform. The common property school provides a train of thoughts on poverty reduction and rural revitalization by suggesting remaining some common forests which could be a space for the rural poor. The paper suggests that collective tenure reform should focus on consolidating reform results and tenure management by laws and regulations. When facilitating forest land scale management, overuse of financial instruments should be avoided in order to prevent “costly inequality”. Fully realizing the long term, complexity and difficulty of the reform and shifting tenure reform to routine supervision will reinforce tenure management.