ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Environ. Sci.

Sec. Land Use Dynamics

Volume 13 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fenvs.2025.1576883

Navigating the Maze of land Abandonment: A Tripartite Evolutionary Game and System Dynamics Approach to Optimize Governance Strategies

Provisionally accepted
  • 1Wenzhou University, Wenzhou, Zhejiang Province, China
  • 2Zhejiang College of Security Technology, Wenzhou, China

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

Addressing the issue of land abandonment in rural areas is a critical strategy for ensuring national food security and promoting high-quality agricultural and rural development. Based on the assumption of bounded rationality, this paper constructs an evolutionary game model involving three key stakeholders: farmers, village collectives, and local governments. By integrating system dynamics, we simulate and analyze the behavioral strategies of participants, examining the mechanisms of government regulation. Additionally, we explore the moderating role of agricultural social services and further investigate the impact of incentive and penalty measures. The findings indicate that: (1) under specific constraints, the system evolves toward the optimal equilibrium (1,1,1); (2) government policies influence the strategic choices of farmers and village collectives, with excessively high or low incentive and penalty measures proving ineffective in mitigating land abandonment; (3) compared to incentives, penalty measures exhibit a more substantial impact on addressing land abandonment; (4) enhancing agricultural social services can strengthen the effectiveness of incentive and penalty policies. Based on these results, the paper offers policy recommendations from four perspectives: regulatory reform, the integration of incentives and penalties, flexible subsidies, and enhanced collaboration among key stakeholders, thereby providing both theoretical insights and practical guidance for addressing land abandonment.

Keywords: Incentive and penalty mechanism, tripartite evolutionary game, land abandonment, system dynamics, Government policy

Received: 14 Feb 2025; Accepted: 21 Apr 2025.

Copyright: © 2025 Liao, Zheng and Yang. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

* Correspondence: Di Yang, Zhejiang College of Security Technology, Wenzhou, China

Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.

People also looked at