Community Characters: How Local Officials Mediate Development and Environmental Change in China.

How do governments and communities translate policies into patterns of economic development and environmental change? Communities are the grassroots node of implementation for many interventions aimed at community development and environmental rehabilitation. Taking an actor-oriented approach to examine how interventions and actor strategies combine to yield varying community patterns, this study draws on focus groups, intensive interviews, a household questionnaire, and remotely sensed land cover measurements to examine varying patterns in 12 communities in a county in southwest China. We use a method of integrated comparison that links community narratives with fuzzy set analyses to examine how community officials with varying strategies mediate the implementation of interventions with distinct goals and implementation modalities. We highlight four implementation modalities--campaign mobilization, awarded projects, household diffusion, and entrepreneurial ventures--with distinct implications for officials who take self-promoting, community-promoting, or strategies. Each strategy combines with different policy combinations to yield characteristic pathways to large or small vegetation gain. Within distinct community histories, officials' mediation channels households' options, yielding differentiated patterns of land cover change, public goods provision, and livelihoods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]