The governance of the rural water environment is essential for improving the quality of life of rural residents and advancing the construction of ecological civilization. However, the current governance system faces issues such as fragmented governance entities and low collaborative efficiency. Therefore, in this study, we focus on the intergovernmental collaborative governance mechanism for rural water environments. Drawing on complex network theory and evolutionary game theory, we employ complex network analysis and construct a complex network evolutionary game model among government departments, and we further conduct numerical simulations to examine the evolutionary dynamics of intergovernmental collaboration in rural water environmental governance. The findings show the following: (1) The reward and punishment mechanism, collaborative gain coefficient, and loss intensification trend coefficient all positively influence the participation rates of local governments. When these parameters exceed certain thresholds, they can rapidly and stably increase the proportion of participating nodes. (2) Nodes with stronger environmental preferences respond more directly to the collaborative gain coefficient, while the loss intensification trend coefficient promotes cooperation by amplifying the cost of non-cooperation. (3) The heterogeneity in economic preferences of local governments affects the stability of cooperation. Governments with stronger environmental priorities are more inclined to form the core of cooperation, whereas those driven by stronger economic priorities are more vulnerable to parameter fluctuations, leading to instability in overall participation levels. Reducing or eliminating this heterogeneity can improve both participation rates and the stability of cooperation. These findings offer theoretical support for designing intergovernmental collaborative governance mechanisms for rural water environments and provide practical guidance for calibrating reward–punishment schemes, identifying key coordinating departments, and stabilizing cross-departmental participation, thereby facilitating an efficient transition in rural water environmental governance models.
Dong et al. (Thu,) studied this question.