Rural residential environment governance (RRE), as the first tough battle of China’s rural revitalization strategy, relies on farmers’ participation since farmers are the main laborers, builders, and administrators in environmental governance. However, lackluster farmers’ enthusiasm and initiative have hindered RRE initiatives, prompting this paper. Based on the survey data of 1804 farmers in China, this paper, from the perspective of mobilization governance, empirically analyzes the impact of informal village institutions, the cadre-mass relationship, and their interaction on farmers’ participation in RRE governance through the entropy method, ols, and quantile regression model. The empirical results indicate that informal institutions promoted farmers’ participation through three mechanisms, with disciplinary supervision impact being the most significant and value-oriented next, but transmission internalization doesn’t work as well as it should. Meanwhile, for farmers with varying degrees of participation, there is a general difference in the governance effect of informal institutions. Furthermore, the close cadre-mass relationship significantly strengthened disciplinary supervision and transmission internalization effects to mobilize farmers’ participation. Therefore, the village committee should implement diverse informal institutions based on the actual situation of their village. Moreover, it is necessary to shape a close cadre-mass relationship to improve the accuracy of institutions’ implementation.

Rural revitalisation in China relies heavily on the rural residential environment and is vital to the well-being of farmers. The governance of rural human settlements is a kind of public good. The external economy of governance results in the free-riding behaviour of some farmers, which does not entice farmers to participate in governance. However, current research seldom considers the public good of rural human settlements governance. This research is based on the pure public goods attribute of rural human settlements governance. It begins with government information and, using structural equation modelling (SEM), researchers construct the influence mechanism of government information, attitude, attention, and participation ability on the depth of farmers’ participation. The empirical results show that ability, attention, and attitude all have a dramatic positive influence on the depth of farmers’ participation, and the degree of impact gradually becomes weaker. Additionally, government information stimulus is not enough to promote farmers’ deep participation in governance. It needs to rely on intermediary variables to indirectly affect the depth of participation (ability, attention, attitude), and there is a path preference for the influence of government information on the depth of participation. As an important organisation in the management of rural areas, the village committee can significantly adjust the effect of the degree of attention on the depth of participation of farmers. Therefore, the government not only needs to provide farmers with reliable and useful information, but also needs to combine necessary measures to guide farmers to participate in the governance of rural human settlements.