Driving mechanism for farmers' participation in improving farmland ecosystem: Evidence from China

Aiming to enhance national food security, China has constructed the high-standard farmland (HSF) on a massive scale and gained significant achievements. However, early high-standard farmland construction (HFC) paid little attention to ecology, and single engineering practices had limited effect on land quality improvement and non-point source pollution control in farmland. China is conducting to explore the development of sustainable farmland (DSF) that better meets the needs of production-ecology-livelihood. And the improvement in farmland construction standards has overloaded the central finance. As the direct stakeholder, farmers should play a role in DSF. Hence, exploring how to encourage and mobilize farmers' willingness is the crucial issues. The study aims to analyze farmers' participation in DSF based on 1133 samples from four provinces or autonomous region by employing the extended theory of planned behavior (ETPB). The results demonstrated: a) Farmers' intention was impacted by perceived behavior control (PBC), subjective norms (SN), and attitude (AT) to DSF. b) Agricultural production conditions (APCs) negatively moderated TPB construct, while policy evaluation (PE) positively moderated. The findings implied: a) Multiform and multi-standard DSF participation mode should be created for satisfying farmers' demands. b) Farmers' cooperatives can serve as an intermediary platform to tackle the participation constraints of group capacity. c) The government should promote multi-benefits of DSF and strengthen farmers' training to increase ecological awareness. Meanwhile, there is an imperious demand to strengthen the interactive platform, personal networks, so as to boost the scope and speed of DSF information dissemination among farmers. d) It enlightened policymakers to conduct DSF in a result-led and site-specific manner to maximize the utilization efficiency of resource.