Conditions for Collective Land Use by Community-Based Organizations: Case Study of Community Farming Enterprises in Japan

The small scale of farms and scattered farmland plots in Japanese agriculture have hindered efficient farmland utilization. We used the spatial anticommons problem as the theoretical grounding to study the conditions for collective land use by community farming enterprises. We achieved this by constructing large-scale community-level data, on community farming enterprises and community characteristics, for six prefectures in the Hokuriku and Kinki regions (12,028 rural communities). Then, using regression analysis, we examined the relationship between the collective use of farmland through collective farming enterprises and the variables related to community functions, controlling for the characteristics of rural communities and dummy variables for former municipalities. The results of the descriptive statistics and econometric analysis indicated that the level of farmland improvement projects and the scale of community functions, such as the number of local meetings, are positively associated with the collective use of farmland by community farming enterprises. These factors affecting collective actions are similar to those in the case of common pool resources in the existing literature. This finding suggests that a community-based self-governing mechanism can play an important role for the governance of underused resources, i.e., the tragedy of the anticommons, as in the case of the tragedy of the commons.