Multi-Stakeholder Co-Evolution in Rural Solid Waste Governance in Northern China: Coupled Tripartite Evolutionary Game and System Dynamics Simulation

Effective rural household waste sorting is essential for improving living conditions and advancing rural revitalization in China. Our study develops a tripartite evolutionary game model involving government, waste collection and disposal enterprises (WCDEs), and rural households, and it integrates the model with system dynamics simulations to examine strategic evolution, equilibrium outcomes, and key influencing factors. The baseline scenario was calibrated using evidence from Inner Mongolia, official data, field interviews, and expert assessments. The results show that system evolution is jointly shaped by government regulation, WCDE implementation, and rural household participation. The government plays a critical coordinating role, while the emergence of cooperative equilibrium depends on appropriate institutional incentives and regulatory conditions. Government strategies are particularly sensitive to regulatory costs, expenditures on public awareness campaigns, and investments in supporting infrastructure. WCDE strategies are primarily influenced by additional operating costs and government-imposed rewards and penalties, with reductions in subsidies exerting a stronger effect than increases in penalties. Rural household participation is constrained by the time and economic costs of waste sorting and is encouraged mainly by government incentives, whereas subsidies provided by WCDE have only a limited effect. Overall, effective governance requires balancing incentives for stakeholder participation against implementation costs, and different subsidy–penalty combinations may generate heterogeneous strategic responses across stakeholders. Our theoretical contributions lie in explicitly modeling the publicity-cost and supporting-facility-cost-sharing mechanisms between governments and WCDEs, identifying asymmetric stakeholder responses toward incentive–penalty instruments, and providing region-calibrated simulation evidence for RSWM multi-agent governance. Practically, it offers a reference for designing differentiated incentive policies for rural solid-waste management in northern China.