Resilience and Intentions of Fishermen Transitioning to Ecological Farming: Insights from China’s Yangtze River Basin

The study examines the extent of livelihood resilience in relation to the fishing ban, as well as the readiness of various types of fishermen to embrace ecological farming under different incentive structures. It simulates the varying willingness to adopt ecological farming across diverse environmental contexts within China. The results indicate that: (1) Self-organization ability, particularly the emphasis on subsidy benefits and policy awareness, could independently lead to interpretive outcomes. (2) Three pathways can motivate fishermen to adopt ecological farming: self-organization-dominant, self-organization-learning driven, and buffering-learning driven. Concurrently, three categories of factors impede the enhancement of fishermen’s willingness to engage in ecological farming: learning inhibition, self-organization-learning inhibition, and buffering-self-organization inhibition. (3) Under specific conditions, self-organization ability can be substituted by the conditional combination of the other two abilities to bolster the willingness of fishermen to adopt, in a manner akin to “all paths leading to the same destination.” (4) Heterogeneity analysis demonstrates that livelihood resilience exerts a more significant influence on the willingness of fishermen in the Yangtze River Basin to participate in ecological farming, particularly in areas with lower economic development levels. Moreover, this resilience has a more pronounced effect on the intentions of older generations.