Designing Rural Policies for Sustainable Innovations through Participatory Governance: A Multi-Stakeholder Collaborative Mechanism and Its Efficacy Study

摘要

Against the backdrop of global climate change and ongoing rural revitalization efforts, sustainable innovation in rural areas has become a key pathway toward modernizing agriculture. However, traditional top-down policy approaches often fail to account for local differences and the real needs of stakeholders on the ground. This mismatch can lead to difficulties in implementation, low adoption of innovative practices, and poor coordination among the various actors involved. Most existing studies tend to focus either on analyzing policy documents or on the responses of individual stakeholder groups. Far less attention has been given to how collaboration among multiple stakeholders can be effectively built into the early stages of policy design. To address this gap, this study draws on the concept of participatory governance and proposes a hybrid decision-support framework that combines dynamic SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) analysis with the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP). The goal is to better support the design of sustainable innovation policies in rural contexts. The framework is applied through a series of multi-stakeholder workshops conducted in a representative agricultural county in East China. Participants included government officials, farmers, agribusiness representatives, researchers, and NGOs. A total of 150 valid responses were collected and analyzed to identify key policy priorities. The findings reveal that “insufficient financial support” and “increasing market competition” are seen as the most critical external challenges. At the same time, internal issues—particularly those related to service capacity and training—emerge as major areas requiring policy attention. Building on these results, the study also offers practical insights into participatory policy design, highlighting how involving diverse stakeholders can improve the relevance, responsiveness, and feasibility of policies. Overall, the research extends the application of participatory governance in rural development and provides policymakers with a practical, adaptable, bottom-up framework for supporting sustainable transitions in rural areas, especially in developing countries.