Jia Liu

As an essential subject of rural environmental governance, farmers’ environmental governance behavior directly affects the level and efficiency of rural environmental governance. In traditional rural society, the characteristics of “acquaintance society”, “circle doctrine”, and “clan society” have led to farmers’ behaviors being influenced and constrained by their surrounding social support and social relations. Therefore, the interaction between farmers will affect the effectiveness of rural environmental governance, and the interaction effect will also affect the implementation of policies in rural environmental governance. In the strategic context of the policy of “building a beautiful and harmonious countryside that is desirable to live and work in” and “promoting green development and harmonious coexistence between human beings and nature” put forward by the 20th National Congress, we follow the principles of Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle from the perspective of circular economy, taking farmers as our research subject. We take the behavior of domestic garbage disposal as an example and, relying on the National Social Science Foundation project, use field research data and refer to neighbor groups and neighboring village groups. We use the Manski model to test the interaction effect of the two groups, analyze the interaction between individual farmers and the interaction between neighboring villages, and, finally, prove that there is an endogenous interaction effect and a situational interaction effect between the neighbor group and neighboring villages. Endogenous interaction effects, contextual interaction effects, and association effects exist between neighbor groups, while only contextual interaction effects and association effects exist between neighboring village groups. The above conclusions provide a policy reference for rural household waste and environmental management.

In order to establish a green and low-carbon agricultural economic system based on the principles of recycling, reduction and resource utilization, to promote a comprehensive green transformation of the economic development and to achieve carbon peaking and carbon neutrality, this article examines the farmers’ willingness to participate in rural environmental governance. Through a questionnaire survey in the Fujian, Anhui and Shanxi provinces, this article explores the influence of homogeneous and heterogeneous relationships in social networks on the farmers’ willingness to participate in rural environmental governance using a logit model and tries to reveal the deeper mechanisms. The results show that: (1) heterogeneous relationships have a significant positive effect on farmers’ participation in rural environmental governance, but homogeneous relationships do not have a significant effect. (2) The larger the size of the social network, the weaker the farmers’ willingness to participate in rural environmental governance. (3) Age and education level have significant effects on willingness to participate. The older the age, the weaker the willingness to participate; the higher the education level, the stronger the willingness to participate. (4) The larger the number of family members, the stronger the farmers’ willingness to participate in environmental governance. (5) The subjective cognitive status of farmers also has an important influence on their willingness to participate. The more environmental knowledge is acquired, the stronger the willingness to participate in rural environmental governance. Therefore, to promote rural environmental management, there is an urgent need to keep modern farmers on rural land and to make the countryside a beautiful space for living and working with complete living functions.

The conflict between excessive population development and vulnerable resource (including water, food, and energy resources) capacity influenced by multiple uncertainties can increase the difficulty of decision making in a big city with large population scale. In this study, an adaptive population and water–food–energy (WFE) management framework (APRF) incorporating vulnerability assessment, uncertainty analysis, and systemic optimization methods is developed for optimizing the relationship between population development and WFE management (P-WFE) under combined policies. In the APRF, the vulnerability of WFE was calculated by an entropy-based driver–pressure–state–response (E-DPSR) model to reflect the exposure, sensitivity, and adaptability caused by population growth, economic development, and resource governance. Meanwhile, a scenario-based dynamic fuzzy model with Hurwicz criterion (SDFH) is proposed for not only optimizing the relationship of P-WFE with uncertain information expressed as possibility and probability distributions, but also reflecting the risk preference of policymakers with an elected manner. The developed APRF is applied to a real case study of Beijing city, which has characteristics of a large population scale and resource deficit. The results of WFE shortages and population adjustments were obtained to identify an optimized P-WEF plan under various policies, to support the adjustment of the current policy in Beijing city. Meanwhile, the results associated with resource vulnerability and benefit analysis were analyzed for improving the robustness of policy generation.