How does land consolidation drive rural industrial development? Qualitative and quantitative analysis of 32 land consolidation cases in China

As rural revitalization becomes an increasingly central goal in countries worldwide, land consolidation has emerged as an important tool for realizing rural prosperity through facilitating industrial development. However, it is still not clear how and to what extent land consolidation contributes to rural industrial development. This study, therefore, investigates the influencing mechanism of factors related to land consolidation on rural industrial development. Following the element-structure-function framework, factors related to land consolidation are classified as follows: technical and public elements (e.g., public involvement), financing and organizational structures, production, living, and ecological functions. Cross-case studies are conducted using two emerging methods of causal complexity analysis, i.e., qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) and necessary conditions analysis (NCA). First, the results of QCA reveal three configurations of factors explaining rural industrial development, including function-driven configuration, function-element-driven configuration, and function-structure-driven configuration. Second, the results of NCA indicate the nuanced roles played by different factors at various levels of industrial development. Specifically, at the middle level of rural industrial development (50% quantile), production function becomes the necessary condition; at the upper-middle level of rural industrial development (between 50% and 80% quantile), technical element, financing structure, organizational structure, and living function become the necessary conditions for rural industrial development; public element becomes a necessary condition to achieve a high level of industrial development (80% quantile). This study shows how different configurations of factors related to land consolidation influence rural industrial development and the diversified roles that these factors play. The findings enable an extension to the influencing mechanism of land consolidation on rural revitalization and shed new light on formulating and aligning targeted land consolidation policies (e.g., endogenous incentives, crowdsourcing platform, and ecological development) to achieve superior industrial development in different rural areas.