Final Report Summary - RECOLAND (RETHINKING CHINA’S COLLAPSE: LAND, DEVELOPMENT AND INSTITUTIONAL CREDIBILITY) China faces an unprecedented urbanization in speed, scale, and impact. Simultaneously, the country lacks a land registry, which has created problems ranging from evictions, urban sprawl, and corruption. To address these, China decided to establish a national titling system. However, titling has been met with contestation due to the complicated land and housing ownership, vested interests, and informal sector. The RECOLAND Project (www.recoland.eu) overseen by Prof. Peter Ho aimed to improve cooperation between the European Union and China how to proceed with real estate titling. The project achieved the following: 1) It studied the conditions under which titling succeeded and failed; 2) It achieved this for urban and rural land, grassland, forest, mineral resources, informal and commercial housing; and 3) It yielded a new methodology – the Credibility Scales and Intervention (CSI) Checklist and FAT Framework (Formal, Actual and Targeted Institutional Framework) – that can help identify possible policy interventions in accordance with local context. The project results were, amongst others, published in the monograph Unmaking China’s Development (Cambridge University Press, 2017).
