Water metering is an important institutional basis for volumetric charging, quota management, and differentiated incentives in agricultural water-pricing reform. This study develops an agent-based model to examine how water metering affects farmers’ irrigation behaviour in representative groundwater-overexploited irrigation areas of northern China, using Otog Front Banner, Inner Mongolia as a case study. The study area was selected because it combines strong dependence on irrigation, ongoing expansion of agricultural water metering, increasing groundwater constraints, and substantial variation in implementation conditions across towns. . The model is calibrated using two-wave household survey data from 424 farmers collected in 2024 and 2025. It incorporates attitudes, perceived norms, self-agency, knowledge and skills, perceived importance, environmental constraints, and habit within an intention-behavior framework, while distinguishing between direct household metering effects and indirect village-level effects. The results show that water metering reduces average irrigation water use from 345.75 to 335.10 m3 per mu between 2024 and 2034, although its marginal water-saving effect gradually weakens over time. Stronger policy implementation significantly improves water-saving outcomes and behavioral conversion, whereas weak implementation leads to a clear attenuation of policy effects. The effects of water metering are also heterogeneous across farmer groups and are concentrated mainly among those with water-saving intention but no action and those with water-saving behavior but no persistence.

Farmers' adoption of water-saving irrigation technologies is key to improving agricultural water use efficiency. However, their decision-making is not purely economically rational. Social networks and cognitive capabilities also matter. To understand this process, we built an agent-based model (ABM). The model integrates economic, social and cognitive dimensions. We calibrated it using survey data from 691 households in Inner Mongolia, China. By setting up four scenarios (pure economic rationality, introduction of social networks, introduction of technological cognition, and a three-dimensional integrated approach), the study systematically simulated the impact of various factors on technology diffusion. Results indicate that (1) models based only on economic rationality greatly overestimate the speed of diffusion; (2) social networks constrain adoption in early stages but facilitate it later; (3) insufficient technological cognition limits the final adoption rate to 74.1%; (4) only the integrated three-dimensional model accurately reproduces the S-shaped diffusion path. This study provides a theoretical basis and computational experimental platform for policy design in agricultural water management.

Pastoral commons face a dual challenge: the risk of overuse in accessible ar-eas and the risk of underuse in remote lands, both of which compromise ecological sustainability and rural livelihoods. These dynamics are particular-ly visible in post-socialist contexts, where demographic decline, institutional fragmentation, and land abandonment have reshaped traditional management systems. In this paper, we investigate the role of social capital in sustaining pastoral commons under such conditions, using the case of Pukë district in northern Albania. Based on fieldwork with 19 shepherds, we combine quali-tative interviews and quantitative data to characterize household strategies, cooperation patterns, and land use practices. We then develop an agent-based model that integrates ecological processes of pasture regrowth with so-cial processes of trust, satisfaction, and cooperation. Agent-based modeling is known to be an insightful simulation tool that studies complex phenomena of the dynamics of institutional emergence and development in such sys-tems. Simulation experiments compare a baseline scenario with NGO inter-vention scenarios to assess how external support influences both grazing dy-namics and collective action. Results show that strong social capital can miti-gate grazing stress and reduce the simultaneous risks of overgrazing and un-deruse, while weak or eroded institutions amplify ecological and social vul-nerabilities. The conditions where agents are joined by a collaborative behav-ior led to much better outcomes than the ones where agents only rely on their individual beliefs, autonomous ones, in order to sustainably access and man-age the common-pool resources. NGOs help reduce the underuse of distant pastures, improve satisfaction, and strengthen collaboration among shep-herds. The study highlights the importance of reinforcing social capital and governance mechanisms to sustain pastoral commons in Albania and similar contexts of rural transformation.

Despite increasing empirical evidence that values, norms, and beliefs significantly shape land use and management decisions, these socio-psychological drivers remain underrepresented in large-scale land use models. In particular, continental-scale applications typically assume economically rational actors and therefore overlook the influence of evolving attitudes, social norms, and other behavioural characteristics of land use decision-makers. This limitation may become increasingly critical under uncertain and disruptive future conditions, where rapid environmental change, shifting policy frameworks, and economic instability may amplify behavioural responses beyond what macro-economic assumptions alone would suggest. To address this gap, this study applies a generic behavioural decision-making module within the large-scale agent-based land use modelling framework CRAFTY at the European scale.

The behavioural extension introduces environmental attitudes, descriptive social norms, and behavioural inertia as additional decision drivers within CRAFTY’s existing competition-based land use allocation framework. In the integrated model, land management intensity decisions are shaped by the interplay of endogenously modelled socio-psychological factors, economic competitiveness, and heterogeneous responsiveness to policy incentives. The behavioural extension has previously been analysed systematically within a stylised CRAFTY modelling environment. To parameterise decision-making within the model, we apply a spatially explicit typology of European forestry practitioners derived from a large-scale social survey grounded in the Theory of Reasoned Action. This parametrisation has previously been tested under controlled landscape conditions and is here transferred to the real-world geographical context of CRAFTY-Europe. While the behavioural extension is applied to forestry decision-making, other land use sectors such as agriculture follow conventional representations used in the existing CRAFTY-Europe model.

The model is applied under alternative scenario combinations based on the Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSP) and the Representative Concentration Pathways to explore potential European land use dynamics until 2100. The experimental design explicitly investigates the interaction between macro-societal development pathways and the micro-level behavioural responses of land managers. In particular, simulations contrast scenarios in which behavioural change aligns with societal sustainability transitions with scenarios in which land managers respond only weakly or even counter to these transitions.

Real-world sustainability transitions are rarely socially uniform. Empirical studies show that land manager communities often adapt more slowly than broader societal trends due to economic constraints, institutional uncertainty, identity-based resistance, and limited trust in policy instruments. To account for this, we compare two different behavioural scenarios under a sustainability-oriented pathway (SSP1). In the first scenario, environmental attitudes and responsiveness to environmentally beneficial subsidies are assumed to strengthen over time, while in the mismatch scenario, land managers resist general societal trends. Conversely, we explore under a productivist pathway (SSP5) whether bottom-up shifts toward more environmentally oriented decision-making could partially compensate for less sustainable macro-societal development trajectories.

These experiments are designed to assess how behavioural heterogeneity, policy responsiveness, and dynamic socio-psychological change influence emergent land use patterns and ecosystem service provision at the continental scale. By systematically comparing aligned and mismatched behavioural trajectories across contrasting scenario worlds, the study evaluates the extent to which large-scale land use projections depend not only on external scenario assumptions but also on how land managers adapt to them.

Palm oil cultivation is a driver of deforestation in Indonesia, involving both industrial producers and independent smallholders (ISHs). Zero-deforestation policies such as the European Union Deforestation Regulation (EUDR) aim to prevent forest loss but risk excluding ISHs who face barriers to compliance due to financial and institutional capacities. Evidence suggests stricter regulations may shift mill sourcing toward more easily compliant suppliers, reinforcing inequalities unless supportive mechanisms are in place. We develop an agent-based model to examine conditions under which ISHs can be included in zero-deforestation value chains and how EUDR compliance shapes price premiums, income distribution, and land-use dynamics. We model institutional constraints, ISH capabilities, and land-use change to study trade-offs between environmental sustainability and social equity. The model provides insights into how governance interventions can balance deforestation reduction with inclusive development in global commodity systems.