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Since 1969, the Moroccan government has worked to convert irrigated collective land in the Gharb region into individual freehold tenure through cadastral, registration, and titling processes. The first titles were issued in 2017, the same year that a new compact between the Government of Morocco and the Millennium Challenge Corporation, a US foreign aid agency, entered into force to develop a streamlined privatization process for collective lands. In this chapter, I adopt the analytic of assemblage to investigate the historical construction of administrative frameworks, material landscapes, and systems of practice governing access to collective land. I assert that the shifting arrangements of sociomaterial relations related to collective land access in the Gharb have continuously assembled new practices of land access legible to state and market actors at a wider scale. This legibility was produced by administrative reforms and the deployment of new forms of knowledge production in the form of cadastral maps and titles deeds, which have worked to formalize and individualize access to collective land in the Gharb. The logic of legibility smooths the contradictions between the diverse objectives of state actors, including rural development to improve economic livelihoods, pursuit of a neoliberal development strategy focused on commodification and marketization of land, and the evolution of a patronage system that exchanges economic gain for political support.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the structure and changes of China’s land system. To achieve this aim, the paper is divided into four parts. The first part gives a brief introduction to the structural characteristics of the Chinese land institutional arrangements; the second part analyzes the reform process of the land system in the past 40 years and its path of change; the third part engages the discussion about the historic contribution made by the land institutional change to rapid economic growth and structural changes; and the final part is conclusion and some policy implications.

After 40 years of reforms and opening up, China has not only created a growth miracle unparalleled for any major country in human history, but also transformed itself from a rural to an urban society. Behind this great transformation is a systemic reform in land institutions. Rural land institutions went from collectively owned to household responsibility system, thereby protecting farmers’ land rights. This process resulted in long-term sustainable growth in China’s agriculture, a massive rural-urban migration and a historical agricultural transformation. The conversion of agricultural land to non-agricultural uses and the introduction of market mechanisms made land a policy tool in driving high economic growth, industrialization and urbanization.

Research shows that the role of land and its relationship with the economy will inevitably change as China’s economy enters a new stage of medium-to-high speed growth. With economic restructuring, low-cost industrial land will be less effective. Urbanization is also shifting from rapid expansion to endogenous growth so that returns on land capitalization will decrease and risks will increase. Therefore, China must abandon land-dependent growth model through deepening land reforms and adapt a new pattern of economic development.

This paper gives a brief introduction to the structural characteristics of the Chinese land institutional arrangements, analyzes the reform process of the land system in the past 40 years and its path of change, and evaluates the historic contribution made by the land institutional change to rapid economic growth and structural changes.

The purpose of this paper is to summarize the institutional evolution of China's farmland property rights deformity with its internal logic, analyze its property rights deformity and the invasions of these rights under the family operation background, and puts forward fundamental suggestions for reforming farmland property rights in China.

The concept of “public domain” raised by Barzel in 1989 is used and extended to analyze China's farmland system.

There exist five sorts of public domain and two apparent characteristics of property rights deformity: the unclear final controlling rights for some valuable attributes of goods of the “public domain”; and the “public domain” deliberately created by the government. The public domain caused by technical factors and owner's real capability are herein excluded.

China's past and present farmland system is a result of the government's compulsory system arrangements instead of market evolution. The expansion of public domains III and V has directly shrunk peasants' residual property rights. The concept of “public domain” is developed to reveal the essence of China's farmland property rights deformity.

This paper aims to fill the academic gaps in the study of the new co‐operative movement in China and its innovative mechanisms, and to assess why new co‐operatives deviate from the orthodox co‐operative model represented by the standards of the International Cooperative Alliance (ICA).

As an alternative to the popular ideal‐co‐operative perspective, the paper employs a historical approach to understand the co‐operative renaissance in China. Afterwards, the paper presents an application as well as an example to reinforce this understanding and to demonstrate the validity of the analysis.

Using this approach, this paper demonstrates the formation process of real‐type co‐operatives under the influence of institutional legacies as well as resources and environments. Moreover, The shareholding co‐operatives have been developed as new co‐operative forms. They are characterized by their multiple stakeholdership, their multi‐purpose operations, and their orientation to the whole community.

The paper looks for the logic of the dynamics and evolution of the newly emerged co‐operatives, trying to explain their non‐compliance with the ICA standards. It analyses the bottom‐up institutional innovation process and the key role played by co‐operative entrepreneurs. Moreover, it contributes to understanding their hybrid form as a nexus of tensions. Therefore, it helps to explain some of the conceptual and practical difficulties that hamper the understanding of new co‐operative development in China.

High-density development requires large land parcels, but fragmented land ownership can impede redevelopment. While earlier compact city development in Sydney occurred on large-scale brownfield sites, redeveloping and re-amalgamating older strata-titled properties is now integral to further densification. The purpose of this study is to examine collective sales activity in one Sydney suburb where multiple strata-titled redevelopments and re-amalgamations have been attempted. The authors explore how owners navigate the process of selling collectively, focusing on their experience of legislation introduced to facilitate this process, the Strata Schemes Development Act 2015 [New South Wales (NSW)].

By reviewing sales listings, development applications and media coverage, and interviewing owners, lawyers and estate agents, the authors map out collective sale activity in a case study area in Sydney’s northwest.

Strata collective sales are slow and difficult to complete, even when planning and market drivers align. Owners find the Strata Scheme Development Act 2015 (NSW) difficult to navigate and it has not prevented strategic blocking attempts by competing developers. The long timelines required to organise collective sales can result in failure if the market shifts in the interim. Nonetheless, owners remain interested in selling collectively.

This case study is important for understanding the barriers to redevelopment to achieve a more compact city. It highlights lessons for other jurisdictions considering similar legislative changes. It also suggests that legislative change alone is insufficient to resolve the planning challenges created by hyper-fragmentation of land through strata-title development.

This paper analyzes changes in property rights, land uses, and culturally based notions of ownership that have emerged following privatization of communal land in a Samburu pastoralist community in Northern Kenya. The research challenges the strict dichotomy between private and collective rights often found in property rights literature, which does not match empirical findings of overlapping and contested rights.

Part of a long-term ethnographic project investigating the process of land privatization and its outcomes, this paper draws on in-depth interviews and participant observation conducted by the author in Samburu County in 2008, 2009, and 2010. Interviews focused on how land is being used post-privatization as well as emerging social norms regulating its use.

Privatization privileges male household heads with powers including rental, sale, and bequeathal of land. However, informal rights to land extend to women and other household members. Exercise of legal rights is frequently limited due to knowledge and resource gaps. New rules regulating land use have emerged, some represent sharp divergences from past practice while others support shared access to land. These changes challenge Samburu cultural notions of individuality, reciprocity, and shared responsibility.

This research illuminates complex changes following legal shifts in property rights and demonstrates the interactions between formal laws and informal social norms and cultural beliefs about land. The result is that privatization does not have easily predictable outcomes as some theories of property would suggest.

Empirical investigation of the effects of legal changes enables fuller understanding of the implications of policy changes that many governments are pursuing privatization with limited understanding of the likely effects.

Based on the brief historical review, the purpose of this paper is to expound the target and bottom line for the farmland institutional reform of in China, analyze the “Chinese scenes” and historical heritage of farmland institutional arrangement, evaluate the policies and their effects over the last four decades and outline the keynotes and possible direction of the future reform.

The paper builds the analytical clue of “institutional target – institutional heritage – policy effort – realistic dilemma – future direction” and review and forecast the Chinese farmland institutional reform.

The farmland institution is an important issue with Chinese characteristics. Over the last four decades, the farmland institutional reform in China has focused on “stabilizing the land property rights” and “promote the farmland transfer.” As the study indicates, the promotion of farmland transfer has not effectively improved the scale economy of agriculture and stabilizing land property rights by titling may restrain the development of farmland transfer market because farmland transfer is of special market logic.

It depends on the revitalization of farmland management rights to resolve the transaction constraint of personal property and its endowment effect in farmland transfer. And, classifying the land management property to involve farmers into the economy of division can be reference for the reform of traditional agriculture worldwide.

In the Soviet Union, the official command structure for economic production and distribution gave rise to, and depended upon, what has been described as a “shadow” economy. In the post‐socialist context, the unregulated, often extra‐legal activities of production and exchange, encompassing the survival strategies of the poor, the emergence of post‐socialist “Mafias”, and much entrepreneurial activity, has been described using the concept of the “informal economy”.

The paper is based on long‐term participatory research over a period of three years.

The paper argues that what we might think of as informal economic activity in Uzbekistan cannot be understood in relation to a formal economy, but is rather an expression of a more general informalisation of lifeworlds following the end of the Soviet Union. Unlike the situation in the Soviet Union, the informal does not emerge from and exist in relation to formal political and economic structures. The state itself is experienced in personalised terms, as a “Mafia”, and the informal is all that there is.

This article provides an original perspective on the informal economy and informalised lifeworlds in Uzbekistan.

The purpose of this second part of this special issue is to contribute to a better understanding of the nature of Soviet society. It is not possible to analyse such a society in all its complexities within the space of one study. There are, however, some economic relations which determine society's major features. We believe that commodity‐production relations in the Soviet Union are of this type.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate farmers’ attitudes and behavior toward land titling and to study its potential effects on rural development.

Using household survey data collected from five provinces of China in 2010, this paper assesses farmer’s attitudes toward land titling and examines the potential effects of land titling on rural land transferring and labor migration.

Rural residential land titling has significant effects on farmers’ attitudes toward land transferring and their migration intention. Farmers who have more non-agricultural development opportunities are more likely to welcome land titling. The titling of rural residential land could provide secure property rights for farmers, and thus stimulate them to trade, mortgage their rural residential property, and migrate to urban areas.

Land titling in rural China will probably affect rural land transferring and encourage rural labor migrate to urban, and thus promote rural development.

This paper investigates farmers’ attitudes and behavior toward land titling, and examines its potential effects on rural land transferring and labor migration, based on national survey data. This paper sheds new lights on farmers’ demand for types of land tenure reforms and how these reforms would affect the perceived opportunities available for farmers.