By Yi Xie, Xinrui Wang, Xian Liang, and Bo Zhai
This Plain Language Summary is published in advance of the paper discussed. Please check back soon for a link to the full paper.
The possibility of wildlife damage to crops creates uncertainty for farmers, affecting not only their income but also how they manage their land. In rural China, farmland is owned by the state or by village collectives, not by individual farmers. Farmers hold contracted rights to use the land and, while keeping these rights, can legally rent the right to farm it to other households. “Transfer-out” therefore means renting one’s land out to another household, and “transfer-in” means renting land in from others; neither involves buying or selling land. This study examines whether wildlife conflict influences how farmers arrange these rentals, specifically whether they choose informal arrangements (oral agreements, often with relatives or neighbors) over formal written contracts.
We surveyed 3,213 households in Asian elephant range areas of Yunnan Province, China, focusing on 921 households that had rented land in or out. Using statistical models, we analyzed how wildlife conflict affects farmers’ decisions to use informal versus formal transfer arrangements.
The results show that households experiencing wildlife conflict are significantly more likely to rent land through informal arrangements. This comes mainly from renting land out: affected households are more likely to rent out land through oral agreements, and rent out larger areas, whereas wildlife conflict has no significant overall effect on informally renting land in. Informal renting-out increases both among households close to nature reserves and among those farther away, whereas, unlike those farther away, households close to reserves also show a slight decrease in informal renting-in, suggesting that they are reluctant to take on more land exposed to wildlife damage.
These results demonstrate that wildlife conflict influences not only land-use decisions but also the social and institutional relationships through which land is exchanged in rural communities. The study indicates that ecological risk shapes which governance arrangements farmers rely on, rather than driving a wholesale shift from informal to formal institutions. For policymakers, this suggests that land governance in ecologically vulnerable regions should enhance the flexibility and adaptability of formal land institutions, allowing formal arrangements to better accommodate households’ risk-management needs while improving coordination between land transfer policies and wildlife damage compensation programs.
