Comprehensive assessment of resource and environmental carrying capacity of village and town from the perspective of governance

Comprehensive assessment of Resources and Environment Carrying Capacity (RECC) is essential to the development planning of villages and towns. When integrating the government agencies, markets, village collectives, and individuals, the village is generally set as the smallest spatial unit and administrative management in China. The multi-center collective action has also an important effect on the resources and environmental utilization in the construction of villages and towns, and then indirectly interferes with the RECC. However, it is still lacking to consider the management dimension in the actual RECC assessment, and the RECC formation in the process of urban and rural integrated construction. Therefore, it is urgent to evaluate the RECC of villages and towns from the perspective of governance. In this study, two frameworks of a Social-Ecological System (SES) and Pressure Status Governance (PSG) were constructed to comprehensively assess the RECC of villages and towns development. Taking Liyang City, Jiangsu Province of China as the study area, an investigation was made to comprehensively evaluate the RECC and diagnose the obstacle factors. The results showed that: 1) Three dimensions were found to form the RECC comprehensive system, including the development demand of villages and towns, the supply of resources and environment, and the collective actions of multi-center stakeholders. Correspondingly, the PSG framework was selected to evaluate the RECC. 2) More than 80% of villages needed to be improved in the study area, where the RECC was above the medium level, particularly with the generally good situation of resources and environment, and the relatively low pressure and management dimension. There was an obvious agglomeration effect in the high-level RECC villages that were distributed mainly in the Nandu, Zhuze, and Biqiao towns, as well as Daitou, Licheng, and Daibu towns in the east, whereas, the low-level RECC villages were scattered in every town. In PSG dimensions, the status index was above the medium level in more than 80% of villages, and the pressure and governance index was below the medium level in more than 80% of villages. 3) The regions with the low and medium RECC were the primary and secondary areas, whereas, the regions with the high RECC still reserved a large space to improve in the future. There were also 4, 5, and 9 obstacle factors in the high, medium, and low RECC regions in the study areas, respectively, particularly concentrated in the state and management dimension. There were three types of obstacle factors, including the global, local and single area. Among them, the water and ecological environment state, as well as the villager initiative were the main obstacles to the coexistence of the whole region. Specifically, the highest frequency was found in the water environment state for all regions, indicating that needed to be improved urgently. Collective organizational capacity was the local obstacle factor in the high and low RECC regions, while the collective initiative and government intervention were the local obstacle factors in the medium and low RECC regions. The states of cultivated land resources and environment, as well as water resources, were the single obstacle factors in the lower RECC region. Finally, the future management strategies were formulated from three aspects of a global, local, and single region, according to the diagnosis of obstacle factors. The finding can provide a theoretical reference to improve the comprehensive RECC in Liyang City.