Stakeholder Interactions in Rural Industrial Green Transformation: A Four-Party Evolutionary Game Analysis

Industrial prosperity provides an important foundation for rural revitalization. Rural industrial development should increase economic benefits while protecting the environment and improving farmers’ livelihoods. Rural industrial green transformation involves financial institutions, rural enterprises, local governments, and farmers. The roles of these stakeholders change across different stages of rural industrial development. This study analyzes stakeholder behavior across different stages of rural industrial development and constructs a four-party evolutionary game model to examine the evolutionarily stable strategies of the system. The results show that environmental regulation, green financial support, the relative profitability of green production, and farmer participation jointly shape rural industrial green transformation. Stronger initial environmental regulation can accelerate coordination, but regulation alone cannot ensure stable green transformation. Environmental penalties primarily affect enterprise production decisions. Under the baseline parameter setting, the approximate lower-bound threshold is F* ≈ 1.60. Green production also requires a minimum profitability advantage. Under the same baseline setting, the approximate threshold is ΔH* ≈ 0.20. Subsidy policies mainly accelerate strategic adjustment, but their additional effects weaken as support increases. Based on these findings, this paper proposes maintaining effective regulatory deterrence, improving the profitability of green production, optimizing subsidy design, and strengthening benefit-sharing and risk-sharing mechanisms.