Peri-urban agriculture (PA) offers significant social, economic, and environmental benefits but also presents challenges. By leveraging opportunities and addressing challenges, PA can become more sustainable. In tropical regions, integrating high-value crops such as coffee and rubber into forest garden models could support PA. Expanding High-Value Intercropping Forest Garden (HIFG) synergies into a multi-farmer coalition of pesticide-free coffee, pesticide-free rubber, and free-range chicken farmers can enhance resource sharing and waste management, improving sustainability and efficiency. This study examines the evolutionary game dynamics of a four-party cooperation model, involving the local government and three smallholder farmers (CFA: Coffee family A, RFB: Rubber family B, and CFC: Chicken family C). The aim is to optimize resource sharing and waste management to increase efficiency and reduce waste. We develop a multifaceted evolutionary game model to analyze stakeholder behaviors under government incentives. Stability analysis identifies Evolutionarily Stable Strategies (ESSs) within this framework. MATLAB simulations, based on HIFG data from Vietnam’s central highlands, validate the results. Our findings highlight the importance of government support, subsidies, and the costs incurred in resource sharing and waste management. These factors are key to achieving a stable equilibrium and promoting sustainable farming. The research emphasizes the role of government policies in fostering cooperation, resource optimization, and waste reduction, ultimately contributing to a more efficient and resilient agricultural supply chain. The paper concludes with recommendations to strengthen resource sharing and circular economy practices in urban agriculture, advancing the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

This paper introduces a novel four-party evolutionary game model to analyze cooperation dynamics in High-Value Mixed Cropping (HMC) systems integrating non-pesticide cacao, cashew nut, and free-range chicken farming within circular and sharing economy frameworks. The model uniquely examines strategic interactions among local government and three farming family types (cacao, cashew, and chicken), incorporating both regulatory mechanisms and cooperative behaviors. Through rigorous stability analysis and MATLAB simulations based on empirical data from Southeast Vietnam, we identify precise conditions for Evolutionarily Stable Strategies (ESSs) that sustain long-term cooperation. Our results demonstrate that government incentives (subsidies, technical support) and reputational sanctions critically shape farmers’ and consumers’ payoffs, thereby steering the system toward collective action equilibria. In particular, increasing the strength of positive incentives or reputational benefits enlarges the basin of attraction for full-cooperation ESSs, regardless of initial strategy distributions. Conversely, overly punitive sanctions can destabilize collaborative outcomes. These findings underscore the pivotal role of well-balanced policy instruments in fostering resilience, innovation, and resource circulation within rural agroecosystems. Finally, we propose targeted policy recommendations, such as graduated subsidy schemes, participatory monitoring platforms, and cooperative branding initiatives, to reinforce circular economy practices and accelerate progress toward the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.

The integration of aquaculture and agriculture (IAA) of the home lot, garden, livestock and fishpond, and rice field is referred to as the VACR system (a Vietnamese acronym: Vuon = garden, Ao = pond, Chuong = livestock pen, Ruong = rice field), not only reduce poverty, increase productivity, diversified income streams, enhanced food security but also promote biodiversity, and sustainable agricultural practices. In the perspectives of sharing economy, within a farmer’s home lot, the garden encompasses the production of various plants bearing fruits and vegetables; the shed includes livestock production; the fishpond provides aquaculture production, mainly fish and shrimp; and finally, the rice field is mainly the production of rice, a staple main food for many cultures. All elements of this production system provide food security for human. In addition, in the perspectives of circular economy, the four elements are also complementary one another, where the fishpond acts as a source of water and mud for the garden and rice-field, thereby nourishing it; the garden and rice-field provides feed for fish and livestock; and the animal stool complementarily used as fish/shrimp feed or fertilizer for the garden and rice field; also, rice field yield rice straw for livestock bedding. That VACR system, applied into a low-income famer family, could be expanded into an integrated multiple low-to-middle-income-farmer-family coalition of non-pesticide vegetable farmer family, rice farming family, shrimp farmer family, and animal raising family for the sake of both resource sharing and waste management to make the agriculture supply chain ecosystem more sustainable and efficiency. This study investigates the evolutionary game dynamics among four-party cooperation under supports/non-supports by government in the context of resource sharing and waste management aiming to increase efficiency, reduce waste, and maximize the utilization of public resources. To understand the behavior of different stakeholders under government incentive policies, we develop a multifaceted five-way evolutionary game model involving a local government (G) and a VACR synergy of four farmer families of a non-pesticide rice farming family (A), a non-pesticide vegetable farmer family (B), a plant-feed animal raising (C), and a shrimp farmer family (D). Through stability analysis, we explore equilibrium conditions of evolutionarily stable strategies (ESSs) for the quintuple evolutionary game. To ensure the robustness of our findings, we conduct a MATLAB simulation analysis, based on VACR synergy applied in Vietnam’s Mekong delta data to validate the analytical results. Our findings highlight that government supports and subsidies, the costs incurred by all parties in VACR synergy to share resource and manage waste to increase productivity, reduce reliance on external inputs, promoting sustainable and resilient farming systems, and the additional distribution income/profits derived from this synergy are critical in determining whether the evolutionary game can achieve a stable equilibrium state. This research enables all parties in VACR synergy to optimize the use of shared resources, waste management, lower operating costs, and enhance efficiency and sustainability. Additionally, government subsidy policies play a crucial role in encouraging all parties in synergy to engage in resource sharing, thereby fostering more efficiency, resource optimization, innovation, waste reduction, and collaboration to better serve agricultural supply chain ecosystem. Based on these insights, the paper offers practical recommendations to further promote the resource sharing and circular economy in agricultural production practices.