Assessing the Impact of Confirmation of Rights and Collective Trust on Farmer’s Forestry Management and Protection Behaviour—A Case of Collective Forest Areas in Zhejiang and Jiangxi Provinces, China

Abstract

Confirmation of rights and collective trust (interpersonal and institutional) can act as primary factors for facilitating effective forest management and conservation. Collective forests are lands held collectively by either rural or indigenous communities based on a shared history, language, culture, or lineage. It is an institutional arrangement in which communities are involved wholly or partly in decision-making and contribute knowledge and labour to achieve healthy forests and social well-being. Based on the existing literature, the nature of collective forest rights and trust can be derived from social, rather than economic, prospects. Therefore, based on the institutional theory, this study constructs a theoretical framework to verify the impact of the confirmation of rights and trust on farmers’ forestry management conservation behaviour. The empirical setup of the study was comprised of a data set of 682 collective forest farmers in Zhejiang and Jiangxi provinces, China. We utilized the negative binomial regression model to quantify the proposed framework. The main conclusions were as follows. Confirmation of rights and collective trust had a significant positive role in promoting farmers’ forestry management and protection behaviour. Increasing the confirmation of rights and trusts by one unit increased the number of farmers’ forest management and protection by 1.846 and 2.631 times, respectively. The interaction between confirmation and trust did not substantially affect farmers’ behaviour. The diverse forest labour force, the total area of forest land, and the number of forest plots had a significant positive impact, while the head of the village and the number of migrant workers significantly and negatively impacted farmers’ behaviour. Therefore, it is necessary to further improve the forestry land rights system and strengthen the trust mechanism so that it can become an effective institutional incentive for farmers to manage and protect forests.