A good ecological environment is the greatest advantage and precious wealth of rural areas. However, with the continuous and rapid development of urbanization and industrialization in modern society, China’s rural areas are facing multiple challenges from external uncertainties and potential risks, such as landscape fragmentation, environmental pollution and ecological degradation. In this context, the issue on developing a modern rural ecological environment governance system and improving governance capacity, which aims to eliminate the vulnerability of rural ecological environment, improve risk resistance and achieve sustainable development, has become the general concern of the whole society.
“Resilience” as early as in physics, refers to the characteristic of material that deformation but not easy to break off, was introduced into a broad discipline field of vision. In the fields of public management and social science, resilience is used to discuss the vulnerability of social groups, organizations or countries exposed to shocks, as well as the resistance and recoverability from shocks. It can be seen that the connotations of resilience are consistent with the goals pursued by rural ecological environment governance in modern complex risk society, and the declining effectiveness of the traditional rigid governance also provides an important opportunity for the development of resilience government. Therefore, based on the complexity of rural ecological environment problems and the characteristics of ecosystem vulnerability, this paper embedded the connotation of resilience ability into the dimension of rural ecological environment governance, and then discussed the concept definition, development origin, realistic representation and influence mechanism of rural ecological environment resilience governance, which has important theoretical value and practical significance.
Based on the in-depth analysis of risk society theory, self-Governance theory, adaptive cycle model and holistic governance theory, this paper tries to make adjustment and application of the classical theory, then constructs an “process-ability-structure” integrated framework of rural ecological environment resilience governance, which to some extent realized the theoretical breakthrough of existing research on this issue. On this basis, firstly, on the basis of historical institutionalism analytical paradigm, this paper comprehensively examines the evolution of China’s rural ecological environment governance model, and traces the historical origin and development motivation of resilience governance. Secondly, this paper uses the catastrophe model to quantitatively analyze the realistic representation of rural ecological environment resilience governance in time series and spatial distribution, and uses the fsQCA to deeply explore the multiple and complex influencing factors and their mechanism of rural ecological environmental resilience governance. Finally, combined with theoretical analysis and empirical conclusions, this paper puts forward some suggestions for the construction of rural ecological environment resilience governance system, in order to provide useful reference for the improvement of rural ecological environment resilience governance capabilities.
Through the research, this paper makes the following contributions and draws the following research conclusions:
First, this paper applies “resilience” to rural ecological environment governance for the first time. It can be seen from a large number of research literatures at home and abroad that this paper systematically applies the concept of resilience to rural ecological environment governance for the first time. This paper proposes that the rural ecological environment resilience governance is a new type of complex adaptive governance model. It takes the complexity of the modern rural social ecosystem and the shocks and disturbances it faces as the background, and through the reconstruction and adjustment of the holistic governance structure, so as to improve the ability of rural ecological environment to resist and adapt the risks, and then enhance rural ecological well-being and achieve the goal of paying equal attention to both livability and ecological benefits.
Second, the transition of the rural ecological environment governance model from the traditional paradigm to the resilience governance is closely related to the macro-historical situation composed of the political background, economic system reform and other elements, and is jointly affected by the dynamic game of multi-stakeholders and the establishment and penetration of values and other structural factors. In the process of rural ecological environment governance model changes, path dependence occurs due to the alternating existence of learning effect, collaboration effect and adaptation period effect, which makes the current governance model embark on a self-reinforcing development trajectory within a period of time, and the vulnerable spots in the traditional governance model of rural ecological environment itself has become the driving force for the innovation and development of the resilience governance model.
Third, rural ecological environment resilience governance is faced with internal and external shocks and disturbances at the level of natural disasters, human activities, and the governance system itself. In this part, the catastrophe model is used as an analytical tool to quantitatively explore the nonlinear continuous gradual change and jump mutation phenomenon of rural ecological environment under risk disturbance, and to analyze the realistic representation of rural ecological environment resilience governance. The results show that the resilience management of rural ecological environment in China shows a trend of stability and improvement on the whole, and gradually moves to the level of high resilience. The resistance, recovery, adjustment and sustainable development capabilities of the rural ecological environment and its governance system have shown a trend of continuous improvement, but the threat of internal and external shocks and disturbances to governance effectiveness is still severe. In terms of spatial differences, the resilience governance of rural ecological environment presents a ladder-like distribution from the east to the west, and different provinces and regions have shown catch-up learning and extensive practice of resilience governance.
Fourth, the resilience governance of rural ecological environment is deeply influenced by internal and external factors, such as economic development, political motivation, ideology and culture, participation of multiple subjects, integrity of governance policies, diversification of governance methods and integration of governance resources. To a certain extent, it can be regarded as a necessary condition for promoting resilience governance of rural ecological environment with the participation of multiple subjects or the combination of different methods. And the multi-dimensional influencing factors of rural ecological environment resilience governance showed multiple concurrent, which were summarized as three typical influencing mechanisms named the type of endogenous risk governance, the type of endogenous comprehensive development, and the type of internal and external interactive governance. On this basis, the construction of rural ecological environment resilience governance system should realize the transformation of governance motivation from responsiveness to predictability, the optimization of governance framework from fragmentation to integrality, and the improvement of governance capacity from resistance to resilience. Then, a multi-subject co-governance pattern should be formed, the institutional system in which the formal system and the informal system are complementary should be built up, and it is necessary to innovate policy tools that combine normal rural ecological environment governance with abnormal resilience governance.