The configuration pathways of organic agriculture development in China: a study based on fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis

Organic agriculture is a popular sustainable agricultural production method and is becoming an important method for the green development of agriculture in various countries. Testing the causally complex relationships between organic agricultural development and its multiple influencing factors and clarifying the configurations and pathways for promoting organic agricultural development play important roles in achieving high-quality agricultural development. This study advocated an asymmetric configuration perspective that tests the causal complexity of high and none-high organic agriculture development. This study explored the necessary conditions for organic agriculture development using the necessary condition analysis (NCA) method. Fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) was then used to detect the impact of different configurations of multiple factors on organic agriculture development and explore the synergy pathways with different configurations for organic agriculture development. Our main findings revealed that no single explanatory attribute of organic agricultural development constituted the necessary condition. Instead of a one-size-fits-all approach, the following four pathways be consisted of market environment, endowments, organization conditions and policy system were revealed with different configurations for the rapid development of organic agriculture in China: led and organized by government; market- and organization-driven; certification- and organization-driven; and certification-driven resources. Three recipes existed for the low development of organic agriculture, all of which presented the absence of organic certification and organizational conditions, revealing that organic certification and organizational conditions played an important role in organic agriculture development. The inspiration for optimizing the development environment of organic agriculture is that although there are differences in the market, ecological conditions, public policies, and organizational conditions in various regions, this does not prevent these regions from promoting the development of organic agriculture through different configuration paths. The conclusions provided empirical evidence and a theoretical reference for governments to formulate public policies to promote organic agricultural development in different situations. The contributions were as follows: first, this study adopted NCA methods to examine whether any single factor constitutes a necessary condition for the development of organic agriculture in China, which advanced the understanding of prior research on correlational relationships between the influencing factors and organic agriculture development as well as revealed that government support plays an important role in driving the development of organic agriculture in China. Second, based on the configuration theory, the QCA method was used to explore the synergistic impact of multiple factors, such as the market environment, resource endowment, organizational conditions, and policy systems, on the development of organic agriculture. This is a useful supplement to traditional empirical research and provides detailed and rich empirical evidence of the complex causal relationship between the development of organic agriculture and its influencing factors. Third, this study conducted a more systematic and specific analysis of the influencing factors and driving path of organic agricultural development at the provincial level. This enriched prior literatures by offering a more fine-grained understanding of China’s unbalanced development of organic agriculture. Finally, we conducted a mixed study of NCA and QCA, which promoted research on the necessary and sufficient causality between influencing factors and organic agriculture development.