E-commerce development is reshaping production, logistics and trade systems, yet its environmental consequences remain difficult to evaluate because domestic and cross-border e-commerce operate through different market–logistics regimes and may overlap within the same city. Using the National E-commerce Demonstration City programme and the Cross-border E-commerce Comprehensive Pilot Zone programme as policy-induced institutional indicators of domestic and cross-border e-commerce development, this study examines whether their co-development generates additional carbon effects. Based on a balanced panel of 279 Chinese prefecture-level cities from 2009 to 2019, we combine two-way fixed-effects DID models with a spatial DID framework. Both NEDC-enabled domestic e-commerce development and CBEC-enabled cross-border e-commerce development are found to be associated with local carbon reduction, and their overlap generates an additional local carbon-reduction effect after the separate effects of the two regimes are accounted for. This additional local gain is accompanied by a positive indirect effect on neighboring-city emissions, leaving the regional total effect statistically insignificant. E-commerce co-development therefore produces local carbon-reduction synergy while raising the risk of spatial emission displacement. Technological innovation and economic agglomeration are associated with lower emissions, whereas industrial structure upgrading and entrepreneurial activity are associated with higher short-run emissions; technological innovation attenuates these carbon-increasing associations. Stronger local gains are found in inland and high-digitalization cities. The findings suggest that e-commerce development policies should move beyond platform expansion and local performance targets, and incorporate regional logistics coordination, low-carbon warehousing and supply-chain carbon accounting into the governance of e-commerce and digital trade.

Digital technologies are widely expected to address governance challenges arising from urbanization and rural decline, especially in developing countries. Yet their practical contributions and mechanisms at the village scale remain under-specified, owing to the patchy application of digital technologies in rural governance and scarce village-level data. Grounded in a socio-technical systems (STS) perspective, we conceptualize digital technology as a subsystem interacting with the rural social subsystem. Using household survey data from 365 respondents in 19 villages across suburban Shanghai, China, we distinguish digital hardware from digital software and examine how they empower rural governance, estimating two-level hierarchical linear models (HLM) with farmers nested within villages. Results show that digital technologies improve rural governance performance through both direct and indirect pathways: demand matching mediates the effect of digitalization, while collective leadership and face-to-face mechanisms amplify it. We also find functional divergence: digital hardware is more salient for short-term, tangible challenges, whereas software is the key driver of long-term, transformative changes. Policy should therefore promote coordinated development of digital hardware and software and strengthen the synergy between digital tools and traditional governance, shifting from “connectivity built” to “adoption and routinized use” to maximize digital empowerment in rural governance.

Coordinating pollution reduction and carbon mitigation is essential for advancing sustainable development, yet whether the rapidly expanding digital economies contribute to achieving this synergy remains controversial and underexplored. This study measures the synergistic efficiency of pollution reduction and carbon mitigation (SEPRCM) across 251 Chinese prefecture-level cities (2009–2019). Leveraging the construction of National E-commerce Demonstration Cities (NEDC) as a quasi-natural experiment, we employ a double machine learning model to rigorously evaluate e-commerce’s impacts on SEPRCM. Findings show that e-commerce development significantly enhances SEPRCM, primarily through the functioning of “Technology-Entrepreneurship-Finance-Talent” nexus. The SEPRCM improvements driven by e-commerce are more pronounced in cities characterized by higher economic development levels, more advanced industrial structures, non-resource-based economies, or superior transportation infrastructure. Notably, e-commerce development exerts significant positive spatial coordination effects on SEPRCM, reducing the relative gaps in SEPRCM among cities nationwide, between northern and southern cities, coastal and inland cities, central and peripheral cities, as well as those on either side of the Hu Line. Further research demonstrates that SEPRCM is better achieved when e-commerce is promoted in combination with other environmental policy tools, such as climate mitigation policy, climate adaptation policy, or environmental justice enhancement policy, which generates synergistic policy mix effects. These findings provide robust policy guidance for leveraging e-commerce development and strategic policy integration to achieve higher synergistic efficiency of pollution reduction and carbon mitigation.

Community gardens have expanded rapidly as community-based urban green infrastructure, yet their long-term sustainability remains uneven, particularly where gardens are promoted through top-down, project-based programs. Based on comparative qualitative evidence from seven community gardens in Shanghai, including fieldwork in 2023 and a follow-up revisit in early 2026, this paper examines a broader question relevant to urban China: why many community gardens fail to sustain collective stewardship beyond establishment despite strong policy endorsement and substantial initial inputs. Adopting a governance-centered, process-oriented perspective, the study analyzes post-establishment sustainability trajectories and identifies three interrelated mechanisms shaping whether collective action attenuates, exits, or becomes relatively durable. First, project-based mobilization accelerates initiation but frames gardens as completed projects, weakening collective understandings of long-term responsibility. Second, short-term external support can create a resource dependence trap that delays capacity internalization and constrains responsibility transfer when projects end. Third, personalized leadership stabilizes coordination in the short run but often substitutes for institutionalized governance, making stewardship vulnerable to turnover and burnout. By reframing sustainability as an outcome of governance configurations and trajectory dynamics rather than participation levels alone, this study contributes to debates on community gardens, collective action, and urban greening governance, and underscores the importance of governance designs that support more durable forms of collective stewardship in rapidly urbanizing contexts.

The effective promotion of carbon emission reduction is a central issue of global concern. In response to the intricacy of the emerging challenges, policy interventions have evolved from one-dimensional, single measures to comprehensive, portfolio-type measures. Nevertheless, whether policy combinations have enhanced carbon emission reduction remains controversial and under-explored. This study takes prefecture-level cities in China as the research sample, constructs a spatial econometric model and empirically examines the carbon emission reduction effectiveness of the policy mix of subsidy-based Carrot policies and penalty-based Stick policies. The findings indicate that the implementation of Carrot and Stick policies leads to a reduction in carbon emissions by 0.452 and 0.46 units, respectively, while the policy mix does not result in the anticipated synergistic effects. Both Carrot and Stick policies exhibit positive spatial spillovers, and the policy mix is also found to synergistically contribute to carbon emission reductions in neighboring cities. Further analysis indicates that the synergistic effects of the policy mix are more likely to occur in cities with higher levels of development, greater marketization, or higher energy consumption efficiency. Consequently, it is imperative to apply appropriate Carrot or Stick policies or policy mix judiciously according to city characteristics, in order to promote regional carbon emission reduction more effectively.

The penetration of E-commerce into rural areas has created unprecedented opportunities for rural revitalisation and increased farmers' incomes. While the impact of E-commerce development on income growth has been widely discussed, its spatial spillover effects and subsequent mechanisms remain insufficiently explored. This study utilises panel data of 278 prefecture-level cities in China and employs a spatial difference-in-difference model incorporating the spatial Durbin model to explore the contribution of E-commerce development to farmers' incomes, focussing on the direct mechanisms and spatial spillover effects associated with the characteristics of E-commerce. Results indicate that E-commerce development promotes local farmers' income growth and exerts a positive spillover effect on neighbouring cities. The significant positive direct contribution effect is achieved through mediating effects of technological innovation and capital investment, while the mediating effect of industrial structure upgrading is found to be significantly negative, indicating farmers remain incapable of obtaining digital dividends from emerging economic opportunities. E-commerce development is also found to better increase farmers' incomes in less developed regions and regions with lower digitalisation levels, indicating a stronger impetus in the early stages of development.

The importance of organizational leadership has been widely acknowledged, while the nuances, roles and the mechanisms of community leadership, as a unique bottom-up type, have been inefficiently explored, especially in rural spaces under the context of population hollowing out. Based on the practices of pilot villages in Shanghai, China, this study delves into the intricate roles of rural community leadership, elucidating its contributions to the implementation of rural revitalization initiatives. Identified into three dimensions of leading and demonstrating, mobilization and organization, and reputation and credibility, and analyzed via Probit models, rural community leadership are found to be critical for the revitalization of villages with hollowing out population. All three dimensions significantly influence rural revitalization outcomes, with varying moderating effects on other key factors, such as stakeholder involvement and policy implementation. Notably, the capability of mobilization and organization emerges as paramount for short-term outcomes, reputation and credibility becomes increasingly crucial for long-term success, while the leading and demonstrating capability tends to be the bottom-line requirement for community leaders. This study highlights the increasing importance of cultivating rural community leadership within the left-behind population for rural development, and the need for sustained efforts to enable community leaders to maximize their talents.

Rural revitalization amidst the backdrop of urbanization poses challenges for public policy. Adopting a neo-endogenous rural development perspective, the pivotal role lies in the amalgamation of external and internal endeavors to generate maximized synergy. However, the appropriate roles of diverse stakeholders and the intricate dynamics of their interplay remain subjects of contention. This study delves into the roles of key stakeholders in rural revitalization, drawing insights from a case study of rural practices in Shanghai, China. Employing structural equation modeling, we explore and illustrate the functioning and interplay mechanisms of these stakeholders. The findings reveal that the government significantly contributes to rural revitalization not only through direct resource investment and policy support but also indirectly by fostering extensive engagement from other stakeholders. The villagers’ organization emerges as the most noteworthy direct contributor, serving as the nexus linking the village with external entities and functioning as the core of community collective action. While villagers, as the principal inhabitants of rural areas, exhibit a significant albeit limited positive effect, underscoring that their participation levels remain suboptimal. External enterprises exert a notable yet predominantly indirect impact, interplaying with villagers’ committees and Party branches. Consequently, there is a pressing need to elucidate the roles and delineate the boundaries of various stakeholders and their interplay mechanisms to optimize their collective efforts. This clarification is essential for maximizing synergies and facilitating the generation of sustainable endogenous power essential for the success of rural revitalization initiatives.

In the process of rapid urbanization and rural marginalization, continuous population hollowing-out and aging of rural communities pose increasing challenges to rural environmental governance, leading to rising overall costs and weakening effectiveness and sustainability. The rapid development of digital technologies offers new opportunities to address these problems and has been widely practiced. However, the impacts of digital technologies on rural environmental governance, and the heterogeneity of different types of digital technologies, remain poorly explored. Based on a total of 365 questionnaires obtained from 18 villages in 9 agricultural-related districts of Shanghai, China, through random stratified sampling and face-to-face surveys, this study systematically evaluates the complex impacts of digital technology on rural environmental governance. We classify digital technologies into digital hardware and digital software and find that digital technologies overall significantly improve rural environmental governance while presenting heterogeneous effects. Digital hardware is more effective in terms of improving rural environmental quality and village landscape, while digital software is instrumental in facilitating cognitive and behavioral changes among villagers, thereby enhancing the sustainability of rural environmental governance. Digital technologies also present significant moderating effects by amplifying the functions of other key actors in rural environmental governance, with digital software significantly moderating the function of villagers' participation, village leadership, informal regulations, as well as governments and enterprises. Therefore, more attention should be paid to facilitating the development of appropriate digital software and promoting its adoption and use among villagers to stimulate synergies for rural environmental governance.

The rapid advancement of e-commerce has brought new opportunities and challenges to green consumption transformation, which is of pivotal importance in achieving the goals of carbon peaking and carbon neutrality. Nevertheless, as an emerging platform of consumption, its impacts on green consumption have yet to be fully explored due to its inherent complexity and the lack of available data. This study employs the panel data of 30 Chinese provinces from 2012 to 2023 to explore the impact of e-commerce on green consumption and elucidates the mechanisms from the 'production-circulation-consumption' perspectives. The findings indicate that e-commerce promotes green consumption transformation through the improvement of residents' purchasing power, the upgrade of industrial structure and the greening production of enterprises, and the positive effects outweigh its negative impact on the whole. Furthermore, environmental regulations of government exert a significant positive moderating effect. The heterogeneity analysis demonstrates that the positive impact of e-commerce on green consumption is more evident in the eastern and central regions of China, or under the circumstances with higher level of pollution, or among population with lower education and income level. This study extends the theoretical investigation into the nexus between e-commerce and consumption, providing a basis for governmental and entrepreneurial strategic decision-making, thus further contributing to green development of economy.

There is a rapid increase in demand for higher quality and healthier diets in less developed regions such as rural areas. Given the large disparity in nutrition levels between urban and rural areas, such demands are justified and should be pursued. However, little attention has been paid to the environmental consequences of rural diet change and the solutions that follow. With its large scale of rural population and the rapid development of rural areas due to the implementation of Rural Revitalization National Strategy, China is taken as a typical example to explore the environmental impacts of rural dietary improvement. A framework for evaluating water footprints, carbon footprints, and ecological footprints is established, and four scenarios are presented based on increased rural income and a reduction in urban-rural imbalance. The findings revealed a significant improvement in diet quality with increasing income, decreasing urban-rural disparities, and compensating for insufficient food consumption (total deviation decreases from 69% to an average of 38%). However, such improvements would significantly increase the environmental burden, with water footprints ranging from 24% to 71%, carbon footprints ranging from 5% to 46%, and ecological footprints ranging from 20% to 122%. The primary reason is increased consumption of dairy products, meat, and aquatic products. As a result, when developing national dietary guidelines, environmental indicators should be considered alongside nutrition and health metrics.

随着乡村振兴国家战略的全面实施,我国农村人居环境治理也从污染治理导向的基础设施建设阶段进入以环境全面改善为导向的管理提升阶段,在此进程中会面临着新的要求和挑战.本文以农村人居环境治理起步较早、投入较大、经验较为丰富且成效较为显著的长三角地区为例,阐释农村人居环境治理的多样化内涵及其动态演变,并从治理主体、治理对象、治理范围、治理目标、治理手段5个维度构建分析框架,阐释在乡村振兴与城市化进程的双重影响下,长三角地区农村人居环境的阶段特征和主要挑战.基于此,新阶段的农村人居环境治理需要促进多元共治,强化需求导向和规划引领,构建上下协同、内外协同、目标协同的协同治理机制,加强市场参与和科技赋能,形成以权利和责任分担的公平性、公共财政投入的高效性、治理体系的可持续性为核心的农村人居环境治理体系.

Collective land rights reform in developing countries is promoted as a means of optimizing the use of land resources by clarifying property rights and encouraging land transfer. However, such mechanisms remain controversial, particularly as the overall cost - transaction, social, cultural - is often judged to be greater than the benefits obtained. In seeking to address whether this is always the case, this paper reports on a study of the "Three Rights Separation Reform" implemented in a Shanghai suburb, China. The paper argues that localized implementation of land rights reform can provided the context in which farmers feel more secure and have better expectations with respect to land rights, which can stimulate them to modernize and improve their farming practices. We argue that localized implementation, with a combination of top down regulations and bottom up practices, allied to both expert and tacit knowledges, effectively reduces the overall transaction cost and offers flexibility for the local community to find their own solutions under complex socio-economic conditions. We conclude by arguing that additional research and reforms are required to further reduce the transaction cost and enhance farmers' long-term expectations and experience.

Agricultural non-point source (ANPS) pollution is a pressing environmental issue in developing countries that poses a substantial threat to sustainable development. With the rapid growth of e-commerce and its great penetration and transformation in many socioeconomic sectors, e-commerce plus agriculture is widely regarded as the solution to sustainable agricultural development. However, the environmental impacts of e-commerce on agriculture, as well as the underlying mechanisms have yet to be fully explored and verified. Based on China's practices of e-commerce development and its integration with agriculture, a panel dataset of 283 prefecture-level cities from 2009 to 2019 was collected, and a spatial difference in difference (SDID) model combined with a Durbin model was constructed to examine the local and spatial spillover effects of e-commerce development on ANPS pollution. It is found out that e-commerce development has significant positive environmental impacts achieved by stimulating industrial structure upgrading and promoting green technology innovation, while the mechanism of cultivation scaling up tends to aggravate the ANPS pollution. Spatial analysis demonstrates that e-commerce development also helps alleviate the ANPS pollution of neighboring regions with a decayed effect over a distance. Meanwhile, the impact of e-commerce on mitigating ANPS pollution shows regional heterogeneity. Those developed regions present significant positive effects, while those regions dominated by agriculture economy and without sufficient supporting facilities for e-commerce development, show significant negative effects. Therefore, we argue that the positive environmental contribution of e-commerce is not bound to happen but instead is contingent, while policies should be adapted to local conditions and enhanced to encourage the integration of e-commerce and other socioeconomic sectors, in order to develop beyond the immature pioneering stage.

Rural environmental governance in developing countries is often challenged by problems of insufficient investments, lack of incentives of stakeholders, and unsustainable practices. Whilst the dysfunction of rural community is regarded as one of the major reasons and has attracted much attention, the role of community leadership and its contributions to rural environmental governance under the dynamic changing context has been rarely explored. Drawing upon case studies of villages in Shanghai, China, this study posits that rural community leadership could be categorized into three dimensions: leading and demonstrating, mobilization and organization, and reputation and credibility. Results show that all three dimensions contribute positively to rural environmental governance, while mobilizing and organizing contributes more significantly in the short term, and reputation and credibility promotes rural environmental governance more effectively in the long term. Community leadership also presents significant moderating effects on the function of stakeholders and the implementation of top-down policies and village rules and norms. Therefore, cultivating community leadership should be prioritized in the process of improving rural environmental governance.

Stimulating counterurbanization has long been understood as a potential approach to revitalising rural areas. While well-established in many countries, in China, it is taking a particular time-limited form and characteristic dominated by issues of domicile and property rights. Rather than being characterised by long-term life choices, counterurbanization in China is predominantly a shorter-term leisure and tourism activity in which urbanites 'curate', for a limited period, a gentrified country lifestyle in accessible near-urban villages. These lifestyles are in some ways akin to second-home tourism. However, rather than purchase property as an investment, this new movement rents and renovates property as a consumption good with which to welcome other urbanites to visit, to consume and affirm these newly gentrified spaces and leisure opportunities. Based on a case study of Cenbu Village near Shanghai, this paper argues that current approaches to counterurbanization in China have limited impact on the revitalisation of local communities. Rather, newcomers from the cities largely superimpose their needs on the village in a way both ephemeral and removed from local people and village life. This comes about less as a mark of distain on the part of the incomers, and more as a result of their exclusion from key village institutions such as collective ownership, rights of domicile and ability to contribute to local governance. The paper concludes by arguing that mechanisms should be developed to enhance the long-term confidence of newcomers, to encourage them to engage with community governance as a means of shaping the community and contributing more effectively to endogenous village revitalisation.

在乡村振兴战略的推进过程中,人口和其他资源要素从城镇向农村地区的流动问题引起了广泛的重视,但是来自城镇的"新村民"进入农村以后,对当地社区的社会、经济、环境等方面的影响及其作用机制等问题尚未得到有效的论证与检验.本文以新村民进入早、成规模且影响较大的上海市岑卜村为例,在长期跟踪调查的基础上展开问卷调查和半结构访谈,并构建基于偏最小二乘法的结构方程模型进行分析.结果表明,新村民进入农村对增强乡村活力、促进乡村振兴起到了积极的作用,但整体上新村民仍难以融入农村社区,也无法转化成为乡村发展的重要动力.主要原因在于新老村民之间的经济联系还比较弱,日常沟通交流机制不健全,影响了新老村民之间互信关系的构建.因此,在鼓励城镇居民进入农村创新创业、带动农村发展的同时,应加强新村民创业创新的配套支持,构建有效的新老村民沟通、交流平台,依法赋予新村民在农村社区中的平等地位,以促进新老村民的有效融合,形成乡村振兴的合力.

Concern has been expressed in many parts of the world that community relations in rural areas are breaking down, making issues such as rural environmental degradation harder to resolve without external regulation. Guanxi is a specific Chinese idiom for characterizing social networks, as a broad term to represent existing relations among people, which can be loosely translated as ‘‘relationship’’. Based on a case study of an underdeveloped mountainous area of Southern China, this paper examined the problem from the perspective of guanxi, and explored the impacts of internal group differentiation catalyzed by pig farming pollution and the subsequent influences on the distribution of costs and benefits of different shareholders. It was found that the guanxi in the village were changed from blood relationship centered to economic interest centered. This disparity exerts a significant influence on the distribution of costs and benefits of pollution control and exacerbates environmental inequalities. This means that pig farmers dominated the narrative of pig farming pollution, while the ordinary villagers chose to suffer without protesting, which hinders the advancement of pollution control, and pig farmers took the benefits of weak pollution control and managed to transfer the external cost to others, while others became direct victims. The paper concludes that the rich become richer and the poor become poorer in both economic and environmental perspectives. It is strongly suggested that guanxi should be integrated into the consideration and decision-making process of rural environmental governance in order to guarantee the efficiency and efficacy of its implementation.

Farmer-led agricultural innovation is increasingly viewed as a potential approach to sustainable agriculture especially promoting rural revitalization as well as mitigating agricultural non-point source pollution. However, little research has yet been paid to evaluating the environmental contribution caused by these emerging agricultural innovations. Using data generated in the Qingpu District of Shanghai, this paper focuses on the new agri-business entities and evaluates the impact of agricultural innovation on changes in their use of chemical fertilizers. The findings indicate that different forms of agricultural innovation have radically different outcomes. Innovation of new production technologies and sales tend to have negative impacts on the environment, while both vertical integration with manufacturing-processing-sales activities, and horizontal integration with service activities, are found to make a positive environmental contribution. The paper argues that the different sources of value added generated by innovation provide different incentives for farmers. Those with a narrow concentration on efficiency and market scale tend to intensify their output-maximized production, while those shifting to processing and service activities rely more on the quality and service centered production, which tends to create less damage to the environment.

Small-scale organic farming is developing rapidly in China, especially in suburbs of megacities, and enriches the connotation of urban agriculture–. Much attention has been paid to the socio-economic aspects of small-scale organic farming and takes for granted that it contributes to the local environment and the sustainable agriculture while little has been explored regarding its actual environmental contributions and associated influencing factors, especially in those rapid developing suburb areas. Based on the case study of three small-scale organic farms in the suburbs of Shanghai, we examined uncertificated organic farming practices, focusing on the farm diversity, fertilization and pest control without chemical inputs, and the restoration of biosystems. Potential of environmental contributions were evaluated from the production perspective of input reductions. It was found that such uncertificated small-scale organic farming does contribute to the local water environment, helping improve soil quality, and gradual recovery of farm biodiversity. However, all the environmental benefits are fragile and highly dependent on the profit availability and professional knowledge of the farm as well as the availability of policy supports.