Digital Literacy and Farmers’ Green Land-Use Behaviors: The Mediating Role of Green Cognition in Jiangsu Province, China

Amid digital rural development and the green transformation of agriculture, understanding the relationship between farmers’ digital literacy and their green land-use behaviors is essential for sustainable farmland governance. Using household-level data ( N = 1120) from the 2022 China Land-Economic Survey (CLES) in Jiangsu Province, this study combines OLS, Poisson regression, mediation analysis, propensity score matching (PSM), instrumental variable (IV) estimation and SUR-Wald tests to examine this relationship. The results show a significant positive association between digital literacy and farmers’ green land-use behaviors. Green cognition is positively associated with both digital literacy and green land-use behaviors, consistent with a partial mediation pattern. Heterogeneity analysis indicates that this positive association is stronger among households with agricultural insurance and those without a village cadre, while no statistically significant difference emerges between suburban and non-suburban villages. These findings imply that policies should improve farmers’ digital literacy, foster green cognition, and provide targeted digital support based on household characteristics. By clarifying the pathway from digital literacy to green cognition, this study offers micro-level evidence on how digital rural development connects to farmers’ pro-environmental land-use behaviors.