Beyond coupling and entanglement: institution–culture–ecology co-constitution in community co-management at Wuyishan National Park

Abstract National-park co-management is often evaluated through institutional design or social–ecological outcomes, leaving underexamined how formal authority, culturally embedded practice, and ecological change become mutually consequential. This article investigates that relationship in Wuyishan National Park, an inhabited protected landscape shaped by Taoist sacred geography, Zhu Xi’s Neo-Confucian legacy, centuries of tea production and trade, and successive conservation regimes. Drawing on a qualitative case study based on field visits, household visits and oral-history interviews, observation, and policy and administrative documents, the study develops an institution–culture–ecology co-constitution framework and traces three linked movements. First, national-park institutions reconfigure resource rights, incentives, and cultivation practices while opening channels through which local forest–tea knowledge enters governance. Second, cultural forms including the place-based category of shanchang , cultivation idioms, and mountain-calling ritual translate conservation requirements into terms grounded in cultivation, livelihood, and moral relations with the mountain, and these meanings in turn shape implementation and public communication. Third, administrative monitoring and residents’ observations turn ecological change into evidence used in evaluation, compensation, patrol, and livelihood decisions. The cases show that these relations form a recursive process rather than three separate effects. Reciprocity nevertheless remains asymmetric: public agencies retain legal and spatial authority, while communities influence how rules operate and how ecological outcomes are interpreted. Situating these relations within Wuyishan’s cultural, commercial, and conservation history, the article explains how place-based knowledge becomes constitutive of protected-area governance and specifies conditions for comparison elsewhere.