Shareholding integrated forestry tenures: A case from south China

This study explores theories of participation and the adoption of innovations regarding effectiveness of community forestry programs. The study was conducted in six villages in the Sanming prefecture, Fujian Province of south China from February 1991 to November 1994.;The research problem concerns how variation between certain broad policy approaches relate to observed variations in the social organization, acceptance, and general attitudes of the villagers and variations in forest productivity. Historically, a variety of traditional, feudal, capitalist, and socialist systems have been applied to the forests of south China. However, our interest is in three policies that have been tried in the region since 1958--a socialist commune system, a household capitalist system, and most recently a middle ground approach, a Share Holding Integrated Forest Tenure (SHIFT) system.;The study methods include an exhaustive and systematic search of available documents regarding forest practices, social organization, history, and village tenure records. There was an intensive three month field study from February 1991 to May 1991. During this period the research team, consisting of the author and three professional foresters from various Chinese forestry universities, interviewed a sample of seventy-four villagers in four SHIFT and one non-SHIFT villages in the Sanming region. This sample represented about 6% of the client villagers in each community. Selection of the sample was designed to provide a representative sample of the client population. Interviews were also conducted in one non-SHIFT village in Nanping with similar social and forestry conditions to those of villages in Sanming.;Other methods of data collection were examination of over 300 articles, documents, records, statistics, original contracts, and other first-hand materials of various sources from the Chinese central government to the local villages; regional surveys focused on Sanming combined with investigations of sample villages and interviews with seventy-four farmers and villagers.;We found a major discomformity between what was observed and what was claimed by the Chinese government reform theory, suggesting that only a version of a capitalist household system can correct the errors of top-down control by the socialist ownership system. The capitalist household system resulted in the manmade catastrophe of losing one million hectares of premature forests in south China from 1981 to 1987. The socialist commune system was high on participation but low on forest productivity. The household capitalist system was high on gain but low on sustainability.;SHIFT, as a middle-ground system, has succeeded in innovating a share holding system--a "private-like" property redistribution--to link individual villagers' incentives and to represent public ownership of community forests. The SHIFT forest tenure--comprising six different types to meet different goals, and eleven characteristics--was adopted to overcome the inefficiency of the socialist central planning management system. The SHIFT system, through its middle-ground approach, also succeeded in solving problems among environment, production, and social equity concerns; between "top-down" socialist impact and "bottom-up" capitalist drive; between social forestry benefits and human forestry demands; as well as other social and individual benefits. (Abstract shortened by UMI.).