Collective action in implementing top-down land policy: the case of Chengdu, China

tRapid urbanization in China has led to the increasing scarcity of land suitable and available for construc-tion. Concurrently, rural depopulation has resulted in many vacant properties, including farmhousesand buildings. In order to address this issue, a national land transfer policy has been implemented sincethe early 2000s in which vacant rural properties are returned to agriculture in return for similar areasof peri-urban land being released for construction. While there have been many different approachesto policy implementation, most commentators agree that successful schemes are characterized by theinvolvement of local people. As yet, however, there has been little research into how such local collectiveaction is organized, and whether it is really possible to address top-down policies through local, bottom-up, action. Based on a case study of the earliest pilot program in Chengdu, Sichuan Province, we seek todemonstrate that the top-down nature of China’s land transfer policy does not mean that it is necessarilybest implemented in a top-down manner. Indeed, we suggest that effective collective action is crucialto the realization of such policies. In particular, the case study indicates that with the empowermentof villagers to participate in the policy process it is possible to achieve a broad consensus on the bestapproach to addressing the problems, with community interests protected and properly monitoring. Inoffering a new way of understanding collective action, we conclude that even in cases where a top-downapproach is imposed, communities can be empowered to act collectively in implementing the policy fromthe bottom-up

Does Small-Scale Organic Farming Contribute to the Local Environment—A Case Study in Suburban Shanghai, China

Small-scale organic farming is developing rapidly in China, especially in suburbs of megacities, and enriches the connotation of urban agriculture. Much attention has been paid to the socio-economic aspects of small-scale organic farming and takes for granted that it contributes to the local environment and the sustainable agriculture while little has been explored regarding its actual environmental contributions and associated influencing factors, especially in those rapid developing suburb areas. Based on the case study of three small-scale organic farms in the suburbs of Shanghai, we examined uncertificated organic farming practices, focusing on the farm diversity, fertilization and pest control without chemical inputs, and the restoration of biosystems. Potential of environmental contributions were evaluated from the production perspective of input reductions. It was found that such uncertificated small-scale organic farming does contribute to the local water environment, helping improve soil quality, and gradual recovery of farm biodiversity. However, all the environmental benefits are fragile and highly dependent on the profit availability and professional knowledge of the farm as well as the availability of policy supports.</p

The Use of Oral Histories to Identify Criteria for Future Scenarios of Sustainable Farming in the South Yangtze River, China

Agricultural practices in Jiangnan water towns have historically been identified as maintaining a balance between human activity and the local environment, but are now a significant local source of water pollution. Using a multi-methods approach, this study deduces the environmental impact of traditional practices, and the socially desired conditions for successfully reintroducing critical ones. Oral histories from 31 farmers in Tianshanzhuang village, South Yangtze River were in order to chart changes in farming practices over four historic periods, and used to estimate the nitrogen and phosphorus burdens per acre. Findings show that the use of Lan River Mud—dredged mud for fertilizer—was key in producing a positive impact, but abandoned after the 1980s. Four criteria hindering reintroduction of traditional practices were identified, and potentially useful but fragmented emerging local candidate practices are considered against these, as are recent practices in Japan. We propose that the cooperation of several stakeholders with various related government departments in China could lead to a portfolio of effective policy changes and should be studied further: to include new methods and uses of Lan River Mud; the integration of aquaculture, leisure and tourism industries with agriculture; and the production of organic produce with well-planned internet-linked sales, delivery and coordination mechanisms

Less is More: Learning Reference Knowledge Using No-Reference Image Quality Assessment

Image Quality Assessment (IQA) with reference images have achieved great success by imitating the human vision system, in which the image quality is effectively assessed by comparing the query image with its pristine reference image. However, for the images in the wild, it is quite difficult to access accurate reference images. We argue that it is possible to learn reference knowledge under the No-Reference Image Quality Assessment (NR-IQA) setting, which is effective and efficient empirically. Concretely, by innovatively introducing a novel feature distillation method in IQA, we propose a new framework to learn comparative knowledge from non-aligned reference images. And then, to achieve fast convergence and avoid overfitting, we further propose an inductive bias regularization. Such a framework not only solves the congenital defects of NR-IQA but also improves the feature extraction framework, enabling it to express more abundant quality information. Surprisingly, our method utilizes less input while obtaining a more significant improvement compared to the teacher models. Extensive experiments on eight standard NR-IQA datasets demonstrate the superior performance to the state-of-the-art NR-IQA methods, i.e., achieving the PLCC values of 0.917 (vs. 0.884 in LIVEC) and 0.686 (vs. 0.661 in LIVEFB)

The Use of Oral Histories to Identify Criteria for Future Scenarios of Sustainable Farming in the South Yangtze River, China

Agricultural practices in Jiangnan water towns have historically been identified as maintaining a balance between human activity and the local environment, but are now a significant local source of water pollution. Using a multi-methods approach, this study deduces the environmental impact of traditional practices, and the socially desired conditions for successfully reintroducing critical ones. Oral histories from 31 farmers in Tianshanzhuang village, South Yangtze River were in order to chart changes in farming practices over four historic periods, and used to estimate the nitrogen and phosphorus burdens per acre. Findings show that the use of Lan River Mud—dredged mud for fertilizer—was key in producing a positive impact, but abandoned after the 1980s. Four criteria hindering reintroduction of traditional practices were identified, and potentially useful but fragmented emerging local candidate practices are considered against these, as are recent practices in Japan. We propose that the cooperation of several stakeholders with various related government departments in China could lead to a portfolio of effective policy changes and should be studied further: to include new methods and uses of Lan River Mud; the integration of aquaculture, leisure and tourism industries with agriculture; and the production of organic produce with well-planned internet-linked sales, delivery and coordination mechanisms