Incentive Policies for Green Land-Use Transformation from the Perspective of Farmer Demand: Evidence from Shaanxi Province, China

Abstract

In the past decade, the green transformation of agricultural land use has been essential for addressing agricultural non-point source pollution while safeguarding food security. However, existing policy interventions often suffer from a persistent “high investment–low responsiveness” paradox, reflecting a structural mismatch between top-down policy supply and farmers’ demand. Using survey data from 478 rural households in Shaanxi Province, China, this study applies a choice experiment and mixed logit model to examine farmers’ preferences for green land-use incentive policies, preference heterogeneity, as well as policy interaction effects across production-end and sales-end dimensions. Three main findings emerge. First, farmers exhibit a hierarchical preference structure characterized by sales-end prioritization and production-end support as a safety net. Green government procurement and green product certification generate significantly higher willingness to accept (WTA) than conventional production subsidies, while green credit support is the least preferred instrument due to strong risk aversion. Second, preferences vary systematically across educational attainments and geographic regions: less-educated farmers favor direct technical guidance and input support, whereas more-educated farmers are more receptive to green credit; geographically, farmers in Shangluo exhibit pronounced caution toward debt-based credit, while those in Hanzhong and Ankang display stronger demand for green inputs and technical services. Third, policy combination effects are highly differentiated: within the production domain, subsidies complement technical guidance; within the sales domain, procurement and certification exhibit a substitution effect; across domains, significant complementarities emerge when certification is paired with production subsidies or green input provision, whereas credit support and certification act as substitutes. These findings reveal the heterogeneous structure of farmers’ policy preferences and the interactive mechanisms among policy instruments. The study provides a demand-oriented empirical basis for designing targeted and coordinated policy portfolios to promote green land-use transformation for similar ecologically sensitive mountainous agricultural regions in China.