Time Banking as a Sustainable Governance Mechanism for Age-Friendly Communities: An Evaluation Framework Integrating Program Logic Model and Ecological Systems Theory

Against the background of deepening population ageing and increasingly constrained community-based eldercare resources, time banking has been recognized as an important mechanism linking resident mutual aid, community service provision, and grassroots governance innovation. This paper situates time banking within a sustainable governance framework for age-friendly communities and integrates the program logic model with ecological systems theory to construct an evaluation framework organized around Inputs, Processes, Outputs, and Impact. Based on pairwise importance judgments from 15 academic experts and practitioners, this study applies the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) to determine indicator weights. The framework includes 4 first-level indicators, 12 second-level indicators, and 42 third-level indicators. The results show that Processes carries the highest weight, reflecting the panel’s emphasis on stable, credible, and sustainable operating mechanisms. Inputs ranks second, reflecting the importance the panel assigns to public resources, staffing, and redemption resources. Impact ranks above Outputs, suggesting that relational outcomes such as trust, reciprocity, and community cohesion occupy an important position in the evaluation. Among second-level indicators, incentive mechanisms, promoting social participation, financial inputs, circulation mechanisms, and human resources have relatively high weights. Among third-level indicators, government funding, fulfillment from helping others, volunteer incentives, operations staff, belief that help is available when needed, and credit transfer efficiency receive high evaluation priority. The contribution of this paper is to extend time banking from a general mutual-aid eldercare tool to a sustainable governance mechanism for age-friendly communities and to provide an indicator framework for project planning, process diagnosis, and subsequent empirical evaluation.