Community public safety is facing great challenges in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. While helping communities identify crises and prevent risks, and improving community public safety governance, collaborative governance is changing the trends of a complex, uncertain, and ever-changing environment, and helping to drive communities toward higher levels of development and improved community sustainability. The purpose of this paper was to design a model of collaborative governance regime (CGR) that better fits the particular context of COVID-19 to enhance community safety and achieve sustainability of collaborative governance. This paper investigated and empirically analyzed the COVID-19 response in Chinese and Korean communities. It is found that collaborative dynamics can positively contribute to collaborative performance; collaborative dynamics can positively contribute to collaborative actions; collaborative actions can positively contribute to collaborative performance; collaborative actions play a partially mediating role between collaborative dynamics and collaborative performance; and there is heterogeneity in collaborative governance regimes in different system contexts. The paper suggests several insights: collaborative governance can deal with uncertainty and unpredictable turbulence; enhancing the capacity for joint action is more conducive to collaborative performance; and the role of government in collaborative governance is valued. Our study provides data support for validating the operating principles and internal logical relationships of collaborative governance and provides an empirical basis for responding to large-scale public crises in different contexts.

This paper emphasizes the key role of policy in the development of agricultural services outsourcing. In this paper, a theoretical framework is constructed to analyze the role of government policies on agricultural service outsourcing under the assumption of the separability of agricultural production processes. The article constructs a quasi-natural experiment using the China-targeted poverty alleviation program and nationally representative microdata, and the PSM-DID model is chosen to estimate the policy effects. We also discuss regional heterogeneity, aiming to identify the ways in which policy affects agricultural service outsourcing. Based on a comprehensive household-level dataset and econometric analysis, we find that targeted poverty alleviation programs significantly promote the use of agricultural service outsourcing by low-income farmers, and the effects of the policies are more pronounced for the central and western regions. These findings suggest that targeted poverty alleviation programs improve the income of farm households in poor areas and encourage the use of agricultural service outsourcing, which can save agricultural labor, reduce the opportunity cost of agricultural production, and contribute to the sustainable development of the poor.

Japan’s shift to a super-aged society is reshaping household carbon footprint (HCF) in ways that vary by age, income, and region. Drawing on a two-tier national–prefectural framework, we quantify the influence of demographic shifts on HCF and evaluate inequalities, and project prefectural HCF to 2050 under fixed 2005 technology and consumption baselines. Nationally, emissions follow an inverted-U age curve, peaking at the 50–54 s (2.16 tCO₂) and dropping at both the younger and older ends. Carbon inequality—the gap between high- and low-income households—displays the opposite U shape, being the widest below 30 and above 85. Regional HCF patterns add a further layer: while the inverted U persists, its peak shifts to the 60–64 s in high-income prefectures such as Tokyo—where senior emissions rise by 44% by 2050—and to the 45–49 s in low-income prefectures such as Akita, where younger age groups cut emissions by 58%. Although spatial carbon inequality narrows through midlife, it widens again in old age as eldercare and home energy needs grow. These findings suggest that a uniform mitigation trajectory overlooks key cohorts and regions. To meet the 2050 net-zero target, Japan should integrate age-, income-, and region-specific interventions—for example, targeted carbon pricing, green finance for middle-aged consumers, and less-urban low-carbon eldercare—into its decarbonization roadmap.