Towards Better Governance: The Facilitative Role of Cultural Embeddedness in Shaping Rural Homestead Land Reform of China

Legal regulation and market-oriented land property rights reforms have long been the mainstream, whereas the role of cultural embeddedness in driving land institutional innovation remains insufficiently explored. This paper develops an analytical framework that integrates institutional logics perspective with cultural embeddedness theory to examine the formation mechanism of homestead institutional innovation through a single-case study. Specifically, this study investigates a tripartite cost-sharing institution of homestead construction, involving the village enterprise, the village collective, and households in M Village, China. In this case, the findings reveal that the collectivist culture plays a facilitative role in institutional innovation of homestead land. First, institutional logics evolved in response to spatial resource constraints, thereby generating the demand for homestead institutional innovation. Second, through cultural embeddedness, institutional logics focus actors’ attention and reshape leadership identity, common goals, and collective action schemas. These processes facilitate decision making, sensemaking, and collective mobilization, thereby activating the formation of homestead institutional innovation. Third, the evolution of collectivist culture enhances the compatibility among multiple institutional logics, including those associated with the state, corporate, community, family, and professional actors. This compatibility consolidates the leadership identity of village elites, routinizes collective action, and ensures benefit sharing, thereby stabilizing homestead institutional innovation. The study suggests that integrating local culture with formal institutional regulations, as well as combining top-down rules with bottom-up practices, can effectively promote institutional innovation in homestead land governance.