The suitability and sustainability of governance structures in land consolidation under institutional change: A comparative case study

Land consolidation serves as a vital instrument for rural development worldwide. Various governance structures of land consolidation and their performance have been examined against diverse backgrounds; however, how institutional change affects different governance structures of land consolidation remains to be studied. A synthetic framework linking the institutional environment, governance structures and incentives of actors is proposed to examine the suitability and sustainability of different governance structures under changes in the institutional environment through the lens of land reallocation in land consolidation. The paper applies an embedded comparative case study using cases from China because the promotion of land consolidation in China is in parallel with rural land rights reform. The results have shown that both government-dominated land reallocation and self-organized land reallocation were suitable and individual exchanges was not suitable to solve the problem of large-scale fragmentation in China, while institutional environmental change characterized by the unimproved land consolidation legal framework and the enhanced private land right legal framework has undermined the suitability of government-dominated land reallocation. We conclude that whether initiation, land redistribution and conflict resolution match with the situation and align with each other determines the suitability of governance structures; Changing institutional environment may lead to mode fixing or mode shifting of governance structures in the long run, which depends on the incentives of actors. The government-dominated land reallocation is not sustainable because the behavior of the decision-makers in the mode, who are local government-officials, has a nature of upward accountability. The institutional environmental change has discouraged local government officials from conducting land reallocation. Based on this conclusion, we propose that land consolidation legal framework in China should be enhanced along with rural land rights reform, and in other developing countries that are undergoing similar reform, connections between related institutions should be carefully balanced rather than simply enhancing tenure security.