Natural Resource Governance in Qing China : Lineage Institutions and the Making of Common Property Regimes

Historically, common property is one of the dominant forms of ownership through which natural resources—e.g., forests, pastures, and fisheries—are managed. However, their decline across societies due to marketization and privatization has prompted intense debates. This Article seeks to answer the following questions: (1) Why did some common property regimes dissipate quickly, while others resist-ed the forces of privatization for generations? (2) What explains the divergent trajectories that societies took in governing common resources? Building on the classic Coasean and Demsetzian law-and-economics principles, this Article highlights two additional dimensions—institutional capacity and social embeddedness of property—to explain how “hidden” social costs impacted the stability of common property regimes. Using forest commons in Qing China (1644-1912) as a historical case study, this Article argues that lineage institutions—a form of organized kinship—created conditions for the longevity of common property regimes in China due to three factors: (1) as a result of the Qing state’s laissez-faire attitude towards property, lineages assumed key administrative functions in regulating property relations at the locality; (2) lineages took advantage of the laws and institutions of the Qing state, which were designed to protect entrenched local interests rather than to maximize economic welfare; and (3) the organizational features of lineages allowed them to provide extra-legal solutions to disputes arising from contested access to common resources, largely displacing the roles of formal legal institutions. These factors illustrate the degree to which organized kinship groups were able to adopt sophisticated institutional arrangements that co-opted, resisted, and even competed with the state in crafting the rules of the game.Although the longevity of kinship-based common property regimes is certainly unique to China’s historical experience, this case study carries vital policy implications, both for China today and for the broader developing world. First, kinship organizations may provide effective bulwarks against disruptive change, allowing local communities to adjust to new economic realities. Second, their resource-pooling features can provide a safety net for individual households that fail to make the adjustment. Finally, kinship organizations can control negative spillover effects that would have led to the degradation of common property regimes