Achieving sustainable rural development is essential for countries worldwide to balance development between urban and rural areas; especially, sustainable social development is crucial. In the face of rapid urbanization in China, the withdrawal of rural homesteads (WRH) has become the core policy for attaining sustainable rural development. Compared with the literature that focuses on the economic or environmental impacts of the policy, few studies have evaluated how social sustainability is accomplished through such land-reform policies. Given the consensus that exploring sustainability emphasizes complex causal relationships between multiple dimensions, assessment models must further consider interdependencies. Based on Chinese expertise and perspective, this study proposes a hybrid multi-attribute decision analysis model to evaluate the contribution of WRH policies toward social sustainability. First, the Delphi method was used to build evaluation criteria covering four dimensions—the socio-ecological environment, social welfare, social equity, and social inclusion—and 20 criteria were based on the existing literature. Second, influential network relations maps (INRMs) were constructed based on the fuzzy decision-making trial and evaluation laboratory (DEMATEL), considering complex causal relationships between dimensions and criteria to further identify the key evaluation criteria for the social sustainability of the homestead exit policy. The results show that the five subdimensions are key to achieving sustainable social development through WRH. Based on our results, we propose certain policy recommendations.

Although exploring the homestead withdrawal (HW) mechanism can optimize the allocation of land resource elements, the livelihood sources of farmers will change and face different sources of risk. Many studies have explored various factors affecting the HW. However, studies simultaneously exploring the relationship among farmers’ internal livelihood capital and external risk prevention capabilities and HW including differences among various HW models are still limited. The present study constructed a simple theoretical framework and used the probit model to analyze the decision-making behavior of 367 farmers in the Jinjiang Pilot in Fujian Province of China. Specifically, this study explored the impact of farmers’ livelihoods including natural, financial, and human capitals and risk expectations. Such risk expectations involve living conditions, social security, residential environment, and psychological conditions on HW in asset replacement, index replacement, and monetary compensation model. The empirical findings indicated that the farmers’ livelihoods and risk expectations have inconsistent effects on farmers’ HW decision-making in all the models, except for risk expectations. In other words, social security and residential environment have a significant inhibitory effect. These results implied that differentiated policies for HW should be considered to enhance the farmer’s sustainable livelihood capacity and controllability of risk.