Mary-Francoise Renard and Huanxiu Guo (2013), Social activity and collective action for agricultural innovation: a case study of New Rural Reconstruction in China. Études et Documents n°3 Mars 2013 43 p.
Since 2003, a grass-roots movement of New Rural Reconstruction (NRR) has emerged in China to experience alternative model of rural development. The movement adopts a particular approach for rural development on basis of rural social and cultural re- construction. In order to understand this social approach, we investigate an original NRR experiment in a poor village of south China, where organic farming is promoted by means of basketball game. An in-depth household survey is conducted to qualitatively analyze this social approach and derive intuitive hypothesis of extended social network for empirical test. With a panel structure dataset collected by the survey, we quantitatively identify the causal e ect of social network by exploiting the endogeneity of social network formation. Our identi cation result provides micro evidence for a large social multiplier e ect in the di usion of organic farming, whereas it is negative for organic experts. Also, our results highlight the role of women, education and labor force for the development of organic farming. On basis of these results, we conclude that organic farming is suitable but challenging for small villages in China, while social activity is a good lever to achieve farmers’ collective action for its large di usion.
Full text of the article available on the French multidisciplinary openarchive HAL http://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/docs/00/80/21/19/PDF/2013.03.pdf
