An Empirical Study on Sustainable Agriculture Land Use Right Transfer in the Heihe River Basin

Ye Sun and Tomohiro Akiyama
Additional contact information
Ye Sun: Graduate Program in Sustainability Science—Global Leadership Initiative, Graduate School of Frontier Sciences, The University of Tokyo, Kashiwa City 277-8563, Japan
Tomohiro Akiyama: Department of Socio-Cultural Environmental Studies, Graduate School of Frontier Sciences, The University of Tokyo, Kashiwa City 277-8563, Japan

Sustainability, 2018, vol. 10, issue 2, 1-13

Abstract: Agriculture land use right transfer (ALURT) is a new policy designed to meet the demand of the sustainable development of agriculture in China. In the Heihe river basin (HRB), ALURT has also recently been introduced to cope with the emerging challenges in agriculture. In this paper, we empirically study the long-term viability of this new policy in HRB using a sustainability assessment. We collect the documents of ALURT contracts, statistical data of ALURT performance, and conduct interviews with its users. The main finding is that the centralized institutional structure of ALURT in HRB compromises its long-term viability. In particular, the power imbalance under the regulation of the intermediate agency, which causes the dissatisfaction of the participants, is threatening the application of the ALURT policy in the long run. Therefore, we suggest that the role of the intermediate agency in ALURT needs to be redefined, to better serve the sustainable development of agriculture in HRB.

Keywords: land use right transfer; Heihe river basin; agriculture; policy; sustainability (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/10/2/450/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/10/2/450/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jsusta:v:10:y:2018:i:2:p:450-:d:131019

Access Statistics for this article

Sustainability is currently edited by Ms. Alexandra Wu

More articles in Sustainability from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().