ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Sustain. Food Syst.
Sec. Agricultural and Food Economics
The Impact of Farmers' Tourism Participation and Social Capital on Environmentally Responsible Behavior
Provisionally accepted
- Jiangxi Agricultural University, Nanchang, China
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Against the backdrop of global sustainable development and China's rural revitalization strategy, increasing attention has been paid to the formation mechanisms of farmers' environmentally responsible behavior. Drawing on survey data from 1,721 households in Jiangxi Province, this study develops an analytical framework linking tourism participation and environmentally responsible behavior, with social capital introduced as an extended mechanism. Stepwise regression, instrumental variable estimation, and robustness as well as heterogeneity tests are employed to systematically identify the environmental effects of tourism participation. The results indicate that: Tourism participation significantly enhances farmers' environmentally responsible behavior, highlighting its positive role in advancing rural environmental protection and green transition, and this finding remains robust across alternative model specifications; Social capital exerts a mediating effect and further amplifies the positive environmental impact of tourism participation through interaction effects; and subgroup regressions show that the effect is more pronounced in ordinary villages, plains regions, and villages dominated by cash crops. Overall, the study uncovers the pivotal role of tourism participation in fostering pro-environmental behavior among rural households, underscores the micro-level transmission mechanism of social capital, and provides empirical evidence for environmental governance and sustainable development in agricultural provinces.
Keywords: Tourism participation, environmentally responsible behavior, Rural sustainable development, Agricultural sustainable development, green production behavior
Received: 10 Oct 2025; Accepted: 17 Nov 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Zhao, Liu, Yang and Wang. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Liguo Wang, wlg2018@jxau.edu.cn
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