Collective action serves as a critical mechanism for addressing deficiencies in small-scale irrigation infrastructure and fostering a virtuous cycle of their operation and maintenance. Village leaders, as central figures in organizing and mobilizing farmers toward collective action, play a pivotal role in shaping participatory irrigation management (PIM) outcomes through their public leadership. Drawing on micro-survey data from 723 farm households across Ningxia, Shanxi, and Shandong provinces in China’s Yellow River basin, this study employed a multi-group structural equation model (SEM) to analyze the impact of public leadership on collective action in PIM. The findings indicate that: (1) public leadership is directly associated with collective action, with a direct effect of 0.530; (2) public leadership indirectly enhances collective action through mediating variables—cadre–mass relationship, institutional trust, and grassroots democracy—with an indirect effect of 0.045; and (3) the personal characteristics of village leaders moderate the influence of public leadership on collective action. Specifically, public leadership exerts a strong effect when leaders belong to the village elite, possess a least a high school education, or are not members of the village’s major clan. These insights suggest that policymakers should explicitly consider public leadership in fostering collective action within the PIM framework.
Ren et al. (2026) studied this question.