Sustainable rural renewal in China: archetypical patterns

Abstract

Against the backdrop of rural deprivation during the rapid urbanization of China since the end of the previous century, rural renewal has been regarded as a vital strategy for facilitating rural sustainability. Rural renewal in contemporary China involves activities that replan, consolidate, and redevelop the extant and idle rural construction land and then convert such land for alternative uses, including new rural settlement construction and rural industry development. However, given the regionally decentralized authoritarian (RDA) regime of China, i.e., a combination of political centralization and economic regional decentralization, the governance of rural renewal and its performance show great diversity. The objective of this study was to explore and elucidate the underlying patterns of sustainable rural renewal. Thus, from the social-ecological systems (SES) perspective, an archetype analysis was conducted based on primary data from 27 cases from the eastern, central, and western parts of China. In total, eight archetypical patterns were extracted, and the following three overarching implications were observed: (1) a governance system aligning with the attributes of rural land resources, the characteristics of actors, and the properties of interactions is essential for sustainable rural renewal; (2) decentralized or self-organized governance emerges to facilitate sustainable rural renewal; and (3) a long-term perspective of designing and enforcing rural renewal and distinctive land resource endowment contribute to rural sustainability. These findings may benefit China and other regions pursuing rural sustainability.

Design and quality criteria for archetype analysis

“…To assess the internal validity of a whole suite, the validity of the classification of the components of cases needs to be demonstrated in conformity with methodological standards, e.g., distance measures to assess whether a case belongs to a cluster (Kaufman and Rousseeuw 1990), or the closure criterion in formal concept analysis (Ganter et al 2005;Wang et al 2019), or deductively, or by standards of qualitative methods. In metastudies, the common vocabulary of attributes should be subject to intercoder reliability checks, and the obtained archetypes can be revalidated using primary studies (Oberlack andEisenack 2018, Kimmich andVillamayor-Tomás 2018).…”

“…Further suitable qualitative or quantitative methods to classify recurrent components within cases include grounded theory (Corbin andStrauss 2008, Moser et al 2019), QCA (e.g., Srinivasan et al 2012, Crona et al 2015, Roggero 2015, formal concept analysis (e.g., Oberlack and Eisenack 2017;Wang et al 2019), sensitivity analysis (e.g., Messerli et al 2015), interpretive analysis of model-centered meta-analysis (e.g., Oberlack 2017), participatory systems mapping (e.g., Kopainsky et al 2017), or analytical narratives (Bates et al 1998, Kimmich 2016. Sometimes, multiple methods can be productively combined (e. https://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol24/iss3/art6/ g., S. Villamayor-Tomás, I. Iniesta-Arandia, and M. Roggero, unpublished manuscript).…”

Rural sustainability methods, drivers, and outcomes: A systematic review

“…Indicators relating to changes in economic capital, such as farmer income, employment, or financial benefits, are the most common outcomes examined (~74% of all primary studies). Social and natural capital indicators are also commonly examined as rural sustainability outcomes in the primary studies (65% and 53% of all primary studies, respectively) while manufactured capital, such as roads, water pumps, irrigation, energy availability, and buildings (Bi & Haight, 2007; Cao et al, 2018; Wang et al, 2019; Zhao, 2020), is less frequently examined (~26% of all primary studies). In addition to these four primary capital categories, a notable number of studies view human well‐being or system persistence as important rural sustainability outcomes (~35% of all primary studies).…”

Avenues of archetype analysis: roots, achievements, and next steps in sustainability research

“…Newig et al (2019) show how institutional decline and failure can act as drivers of sustainability transformations in five surprising ways. Wang et al (2019) demonstrate how institutional fit and decentralized governance can facilitate rural renewal in China. Villamayor-Tomas et al…”

“…Newig et al (2019) use archetype analysis to develop a theoretical argument about sustainability pathways. Several studies work with original empirical material to identify a whole suite of archetypes to explain or sort out phenomena in their cases (Karrasch et al 2019, Moser et al 2019, Villamayor-Tomas et al 2020b, Wang et al 2019. Other papers identify whole suites of archetypes through meta-studies of secondary sources (Gotgelf et al 2020, Horcea-Milcu et al 2020, Tribaldos et al 2020.…”