Market integration and cooperative resource harvesting among kin, clan, and neighbors in rural China

Abstract

Non-timber forest products, such as wild mushrooms, are important in rural livelihoods worldwide. As resource pressures and environmental goals change, land tenure and harvesting arrangements also create novel conditions influencing local communities’ resource access. When commons governance encourages (or discourages) cooperative resource harvesting, this may also impact other social ties among community members. Attention to social relationships that are created or limited under particular commons governance regimes is a key part of holistically understanding their social and ecological impacts. We investigate cooperative mushroom harvesting ties in the context of local forest governance in a Yi community in rural Yunnan, China. We use quantitative and qualitative descriptions, regression analysis, and network community detection to investigate how cooperative harvesting partnerships created through the local wild mushroom management system interact with kinship, distance between households, clan affiliation, and networks of social support. The community detection results indicate that social support and cooperative harvesting are highly interdependent. Although social support ties are themselves predicted by household proximity, kinship, and clan membership, kinship ties are surprisingly a poor predictor of co-harvesting. The results suggest that a multiplex network approach is needed to understand how new natural resource management systems may impact community-level social structure and cooperation.