Collaborative governance for household livelihood resilience under climate change: evidence from China and a government–community–household framework

Abstract

Enhancing household livelihood resilience under climate change requires attention not only to household assets and coping strategies, but also to the governance arrangements through which support, coordination, and feedback are organized. However, the mechanisms through which governments, communities, and households interact to shape livelihood resilience remain insufficiently integrated in existing frameworks. This study adopts a scoping review and framework-synthesis design to examine China-focused empirical evidence on collaborative climate governance and rural livelihood resilience. Drawing on 80 retained seed studies and 41 citation-traced supporting studies, the review synthesizes how governmental support, community mediation, and household response interact across scales. The synthesis shows that collaborative governance shapes livelihood resilience through five interrelated dimensions: risk perception, buffer capacity, livelihood strategy adjustment, self-organization capacity, and learning capacity. At the same time, collaboration does not generate uniformly positive outcomes. Public support may coexist with dependence, coordination with mismatch, and collective organization with exclusion. Building on these findings, the paper develops an evidence-informed government–community–household framework that integrates enabling and constraining mechanisms, feedback processes, and boundary conditions within a single analytical structure. The framework provides a structured basis for examining how collaborative governance shapes livelihood resilience across varied institutional and development conditions. The study contributes to a governance-mediated understanding of livelihood resilience and offers analytical insights for rural climate adaptation in China and other developing contexts.