Competing roles of policy interventions and economic incentives shaping protected areas' resistance to cropland expansion: A 30-year analysis from China
Document Type
Research-Article
Journal Name
Ecological Frontiers
Keywords
Economic incentives, Land-use change, Protected area, Social-ecological system, Temporal mismatch
Abstract
Protected areas' resistance to land-use conversion varies over time, but the drivers of this temporal variation remain insufficiently understood. One underexplored explanation is the interaction between policy development and economic incentives. In this study, we analyze cropland dynamics within China's national nature reserves from 1990 to 2022 by integrating dynamic autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) modeling with process tracing. We find that the unstable resistance of protected areas to cropland expansion is associated with temporal mismatches between policy cycles and market incentives. Major policy phases broadly coincided with short-term slowdowns in cropland expansion, but longer-run dynamics tracked persistent economic incentives more closely. These results suggest that protected area effectiveness depends not only on whether conservation policies are introduced, but also on whether governance responses are sufficiently sustained and temporally aligned with the economic conditions shaping land-use profitability. This study also provides a process-based explanation for why conservation performance may appear effective in specific phases yet remain unstable over longer time horizons. © 2026 Elsevier B.V.