Clarification of collective land rights and its impact on non-agricultural land use in the Pearl River Delta of China: A case of Shunde

•The LSC is a bottom-up institutional reform to clarify collective land rights.•The LSC has influenced non-agricultural land uses in the Pearl River Delta.•Solutions come from the combination of top-down and bottom-up approaches.

During the past several decades the rural industrialization process has exploded in many developed areas of China, which has greatly affected land use in the rural China. This paper argues that the double-track land use and management system is one of the major institutional settings behind non-agricultural land uses and demonstrates how the bottom-up institutional reform, the land share-holding cooperative, has influenced non-agricultural land uses in the Pearl River Delta. Taking Shunde as a case study, this paper analyzes land use dynamics and characteristics in Shunde. It finds that the establishment of land shareholding cooperatives has facilitated the industrialization process on a low cost basis through pooling the fragmentally-held land plots. Meanwhile, however, the village-based development has caused the fragmentation of construction land due to the governance fragmentation. It concludes that solutions to the problems will come from the negotiated relationship between top-down and bottom-up approaches, a combination of the two.