Dynamic strategies for collaborative governance of rural environments: a simulation study on the most effective mechanisms

Rural environmental governance is one of the important tasks in China’s rural revitalization strategy. Currently, relying solely on government governance cannot effectively solve the environmental governance needs of nearly 700 thousand administrative villages in China. Building a collaborative governance model of “government regulation + villagers’ supervision” is the key to achieving successful rural environmental governance. Previous literature mainly used the evolutionary game model under the static reward and punishment mechanism (SRPM) to study the strategy evolution dynamics of village enterprises, the government and villagers. However, the simple model setting makes it difficult for the game system to accurately depict complex real-world problems, and it is concluded that the evolutionary stable strategy (ESS) of the game system can only be pure strategy Nash equilibrium (PSNE). In fact, it is difficult to see the stable strategy of “either this or that”, and most of the strategy combinations with asymptotic stability are mixed strategy Nash equilibrium (MSNE) rather than PSNE, which indicates that the model construction based on the SRPM is problematic. Therefore, this paper expands the SRPM and studies the strategic evolution dynamics of village enterprises, the government and villagers under the dynamic reward and punishment mechanism (DRPM). Theoretical research has shown that MSNE may indeed be the system’s ESS under the DRPM, and a mathematical proof was provided. System simulation has shown that under the SRPM, village enterprises, the government, and villagers all exhibited a periodic strategy selection mode, and the strategies of all parties cannot achieve asymptotic stability. However, under the DRPM, the strategies of all parties eventually tend to stabilize over time, and MSNE is the system’s ESS. This indicates that there is indeed a situation where MSNE is the system’s ESS, and also confirms that the DRPM is indeed a stability improvement compared with the traditional SRPM. Finally, it is suggested that the government should focus on raising the upper limit of punishments for illegal emissions by village enterprises, and should carefully raise the upper limit of rewards for active supervision by villagers.