Multi-Stakeholder Collaborative Governance for Historic District Conservation: An Evolutionary Game Analysis from China’s Urban Renewal Perspective

Balancing cultural heritage conservation with urban renewal has become a critical challenge for sustainable urban development worldwide. Although collaborative governance has been widely advocated for heritage conservation, existing studies primarily examine bilateral interactions among stakeholders and pay limited attention to the dynamic mechanisms through which governments, social capital, and community residents jointly shape conservation outcomes. Consequently, the institutional conditions that enable stable multi-stakeholder collaboration remain insufficiently understood. To address this gap, this study develops a tripartite evolutionary game model involving local governments, social capital, and community residents to investigate the dynamic evolution of collaborative governance in historic district conservation. Taking the Enning Road urban renewal project in China as the case background and incorporating other relevant materials on the renovation of historical and cultural districts, five scenarios were constructed. Through evolutionary stability analysis and MATLAB-based numerical simulation, this study explored the effects of key institutional variables including superior government incentives, regulatory penalties, and resident participation incentives. The results reveal that collaborative governance exhibits multiple evolutionary stable strategies rather than a single equilibrium, with convergence strongly influenced by both initial strategic choices and institutional parameter settings. Appropriate governmental incentives and regulatory penalties substantially enhance the likelihood of stable collaboration, while reducing participation costs and increasing participation benefits each strengthen residents’ incentives. Furthermore, the findings support coordinating incentive, constraint, and participation mechanisms, which is found to be more influential than any single governance instrument in promoting long-term collaborative conservation. This study extends collaborative governance theory by explaining how multi-stakeholder interactions evolve under bounded rationality and identifies the institutional conditions required for stable collaboration in historic district conservation. The findings provide theoretical insights into sustainable urban heritage governance and offer practical implications for designing integrated policy frameworks that reconcile heritage conservation with urban renewal.