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.

Urbanization and aging populations are threatening the sustainability of rural development around the world. Improving the happiness of rural residents is closely related not only to rural development but also to the harmony and stability of a country. Sustainable development has become an important strategy for China’s rural areas. Although withdrawal from rural homesteads is an important issue in rural land policy, few researchers have examined the determinants of the subjective well-being of farmers following withdrawal. The current paper investigated 315 rural residents under three models of the “withdrawal from homestead” policy in Jinjiang City, Fujian Province, China. The application of the orderly probit model revealed how satisfaction with economic, social, environment, cultural, and policy factors impacted their subjective well-being. The pooled results showed that satisfaction with cultural and policy factors had no significant impact; however, the other aspects significantly promoted their subjective well-being. The empirical model with interaction terms indicated the significant positive impact of economic, environmental, and social factors on subjective well-being under the index replacement model, while only environment and social factors exerted a significant positive impact under the asset replacement and monetary compensation models. Corresponding policy implications are discussed.

Ecological security patterns are an effective tool by which to balance economic development with ecological protection. This study used the Integrated Valuation of Ecosystem Services and Tradeoffs (InVEST) model in conjunction with circuit theory to evaluate ecosystem quality from four dimensions: background conditions, topography, landscape structure, and ecological resistance. Our objective was to identify ecological “pinch points” in order to create an ecological security pattern that would be sustainable under a range of land use functions. We selected as the research target the Xia-Zhang-Quan metropolitan area in China due to the extensive soil erosion and general degradation of ecosystems caused by its rapid socio-economic development. Our analysis identified 17 ecological source sites covering 11,512 km², which accounts for 45.36% of the total area. The inter-source corridor includes 31 key corridors and 10 potential corridors covering 3305 km. The average ecosystem quality of this area was estimated at 0.65 at an optimal granularity of 400 m. The distribution of resistance values in the study area was relatively concentrated with the land divided into an ecological buffer zone (34.6%), an environmentally sensitive zone (10.9%), and a blocking zone (9.2%). Our analysis also revealed various corridors based on the regional and functional characteristics of ecological elements and improvement strategies at the pinch points to help restore the function of ecological sources. Protection of these corridors will help to maintain regional ecological security patterns and optimize the structure of ecological spaces with the aim of achieving sustainable development.