Rural tourism has emerged as an efficient strategy for rural revitalization while having various impacts on rural governance. Previous studies predominantly focused on the social implications of rural tourism and its impact on institutional arrangements while neglecting the influence of rural tourism on collective action in rural governance. This study employed a social–ecological system (SES) framework to investigate the influence of rural tourism on rural collective action, utilizing survey data from 22 provinces (autonomous regions and municipalities directly under the central government), 178 villages, and 3282 rural households across China. The findings revealed that rural tourism exerted a positive influence on collective action, primarily through labor force reflow mechanisms. Specifically, the leadership of village cadres had a moderating role in enhancing this positive correlation. Further analysis revealed significant heterogeneity in tourism governance effects: non-plain regions and villages with medium to low economic development levels exhibited substantial improvements in collective action, whereas plain areas and economically advanced villages may manifest potentially negative impacts. Theoretically, this study contributes to elucidating tourism-driven self-governance mechanisms by applying the SES framework, thereby transcending the traditional dualistic debate between state-market and development-governance paradigms. Practically, we propose institutional designs that embed collective action mechanisms into the coupled synergistic development of rural tourism and community governance, thereby activating endogenous motivations for rural self-governance.

Rural tourism is regarded as a significant pathway to enhance the well-being of rural households. However, existing research has yet to systematically examine the moderating role of governance conditions. Using data from the China Rural Revitalization Survey 2022 (CRRS), this study empirically investigates the influence and underlying mechanisms of rural tourism on the subjective well-being of rural residents, employing OLS as the baseline analysis, applying IV to address endogeneity, and using PSM for robustness checks. The findings reveal the following: First, rural tourism enhances the subjective well-being of rural residents. Second, organizational conditions and leadership conditions play a positive moderating role in the impact of rural tourism on rural residents’ well-being. Third, the positive impact of rural tourism on the subjective well-being of rural residents varies significantly across villages, and the realization of this effect is highly contingent on a village’s institutional planning capabilities and the administrative experience of village cadres. The marginal contribution of this study lies in revealing the boundary conditions for rural tourism to enhance rural residents’ well-being and uncovering the moderating mechanism of the governance conditions in the relationship between rural tourism and well-being.