What are the configuration paths for improving the business performance of land trusteeship enterprises?

1 Introduction

The entry of commercial capital into rural areas to provide land trusteeship services has effectively resolved China’s long-standing challenges of “who will farm the land” and “how to farm it” (Jiang et al., 2025). Through large-scale and scientifically managed intensive farming, land trusteeship has significantly boosted grain production capacity, stabilized market supply and built a solid defense for national food security (Zhou et al., 2023; Jiang et al., 2024). However, beneath the facade of significant macro-level benefits, land trusteeship enterprises at the micro-level are generally mired in an operational dilemma characterized by “revenue growth without profit growth.” Most enterprises face the predicament of meager revenue or even persistent losses, with low returns on assets and limited market expansion. Their operations are largely confined to local areas, making it difficult to achieve economies of scale. At its root, this is primarily constrained by three factors. Firstly, the rigid squeeze of soaring costs. Soaring labor costs during peak farming seasons and the sharp volatility of agricultural input prices make it difficult for enterprises to effectively control procurement and operational costs (Foster and Rosenzweig, 2022). Secondly, structural shortcomings in risk resilience. Faced with the dual uncertainties of climate disasters and international markets, enterprises lack precise market analysis mechanism, making it difficult to adjust planting strategies proactively (Tomashuk, 2023; Li, 2025). Thirdly, there is disorder in internal management. The absence of scientific management systems leads to production management missing critical agricultural timeframes and makes it difficult to address issues of agricultural labor supervision (Yu et al., 2026a). Innovation in the internal and external governance systems of agricultural enterprises is limited (Bijman et al., 2014). Different land trusteeship organizations also exhibit significant variations in their governance models (Jiang, 2020). Against this backdrop of practical challenges, how can land trusteeship enterprises improve their business performance? What pathways exist for such improvement? These constitute the core scientific questions this study aims to address.

However, existing research has not yet given this issue sufficient attention. Research on corporate performance has generally evolved from a focus on “financial outcomes” to “multidimensional outcomes,” and from “efficiency assessments” to “strategic and governance explanations” (Mukonza and Swarts, 2020). Research on the performance of industrial and commercial enterprises offers valuable insights for improving the performance of agricultural enterprises (Herrera, 2016; Le Pennec and Raufflet, 2018). For instance, this includes emphasizing the combination of a firm’s resource endowments and capabilities (Gartenberg et al., 2019), maintaining positive relationships with multiple stakeholders such as partners, customers and communities (Zhang et al., 2022), and applying digital technologies (Zhai et al., 2022; Chen and Srinivasan, 2024). In the context of agricultural enterprises, performance is not only reflected in financial outcomes such as profit, revenue growth and cost control, but is also highly correlated with the seasonality of agricultural production, exposure to natural risks, the specificity of assets and the stability of relationships with external stakeholders (Yakubiv et al., 2020; Lu and Chen, 2021). Existing research in this area focuses on measurement and influencing factors. The first strand concerns the multidimensional measurement of agricultural enterprise performance. On the one hand, financial indicators such as operating revenue, net profit, return on assets, cost-to-revenue ratio and cash flow status are commonly used (Balaniuk et al., 2023). On the other hand, the scope has been extended to include non-financial indicators such as service quality, contractual reliability, customer loyalty, market expansion capabilities and sustainability performance (Fu et al., 2021). The second strand concerns the determinants of agricultural enterprise performance (Gupta et al., 2023). From an efficiency perspective, digital technology, economies of scale, equipment utilization, standardized operations and process management are key drivers of improved performance in agricultural enterprises (Kuzmenko and Chyzhevska, 2024; Fang and Shen, 2025). From a governance perspective, contractual arrangements, trust issues, incentives and constraints, risk sharing and relational governance significantly influence transaction costs and contract fulfilment stability, thereby affecting performance realization (Hu et al., 2021; Shi and Wang, 2023). Empirical research shows that the quality risk level of land trusteeship services is relatively high, and the risk differences among different organizational models and different crops are significant, which directly impacts the service organization’s performance stability and farmers’ willingness to renew contracts (Sui and Yu, 2025), thereby affecting the performance of agricultural enterprises. From an environmental perspective, the provision of local institutional support, government support, infrastructure conditions and market volatility alter the boundaries of enterprise performance realization by influencing factor availability and levels of uncertainty (Fan et al., 2024; Boiko et al., 2024).

Taken together, this body of work leaves two gaps. Firstly, there is a scarcity of research exploring the enhancement of corporate performance from the perspective of external interest linkage mechanism. Although a small number of scholars have focused on the role of social networks between agricultural enterprises and farmers, as well as the performance-enhancing effects of relationship governance between them, trust at the social level constitutes only a part of the interest linkage mechanism between agricultural enterprises and farmers. While mutual economic benefit is the core of interest linkage mechanism. Consequently, the role of interest linkage mechanism among the antecedent variables influencing the improvement of business performance requires further emphasis. Secondly, existing studies predominantly employ regression analysis, which fails to capture the confounding effects arising from the interdependence of multiple influencing factors, nor does it reflect the asymmetry between these factors and the business performance of land trusteeship enterprises.

In response to the practical issues and research gaps above, this study draws on survey data from 330 typical land trusteeship enterprises in China, then employs a fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fsQCA) method to investigate the pathways through which interest linkage mechanism influence the business performance of land trusteeship enterprises. We further analyze heterogeneity in trusteeship models and service items, then concludes with robustness tests involving adjustments to calibration anchors and parameter thresholds. This study is expected to provide guidance for improving the operational performance of land trusteeship enterprises.

This paper makes two contributions. Firstly, it analyses pathways for improving the business performance of land trusteeship enterprises from the perspective of interest linkage mechanism. Existing research predominantly proposes pathways for improving business performance from the perspective of internal resource allocation within enterprises. In contrast, this paper adopts an external perspective, grounded in the framework of interest linkage mechanism, to explore pathways for enhancing the business performance of land trusteeship enterprises. Secondly, this paper employs an fsQCA method to propose pathways for enhancing the business performance of land trusteeship enterprises. Unlike traditional regression analysis, which calculates only the net effect of individual influencing factors, this study adopts a configurational perspective and utilizes qualitative comparative analysis to examine the coupled effects of multiple influencing factors, while discerning the distinct pathways leading to high versus low business performance.

2 Theoretical analysis and framework

2.1 Relational contract theory and its application in this paper

Relational contract theory originated from Macneil’s reflection on the “discrete transaction” assumption of classical contract theory. Macneil (1978) distinguished between discrete transactions and relational transactions, pointing out that real-world exchanges are not isolated, one-time acts settled instantaneously, but rather long-term processes embedded in ongoing social relationships, whose maintenance depends on a series of relational norms such as reciprocity, role preservation, relational solidarity, and flexible adjustment. Transaction-cost economics, as represented by Williamson (1985), further reveals the incompleteness of formal contracts from three dimensions: bounded rationality, opportunism, and asset specificity. Due to cognitive limitations, contracting parties cannot exhaustively anticipate all future scenarios in advance and incorporate them into the terms of the contract, while investments in specificity “lock” the parties into the existing relationship ex post, leaving room for exploitative behavior. When formal contracts cannot cover all transaction details due to excessive contracting costs, relational contracts instead rely on reputation constraints, expectations of reciprocity, and mutual trust under repeated games to achieve self-enforcement (MacLeod and Malcomson, 1989). Among these, trust is regarded as the core element of relational governance—that is, a party’s positive expectation, under conditions of uncertainty, that the other party will not engage in opportunistic behavior by exploiting its vulnerability (Granovetter, 1985).

Land trusteeship is a cross-period transaction in which farmers entrust some or all production processes to an enterprise. The incompleteness of the formal contract is determined by both the technical nature of agricultural production and the characteristics of the parties involved. In practice, most trusteeship contracts can only serve as framework agreements, leaving a significant amount of discretion regarding residual decisions and ex post adjustments to the performance process; this precisely constitutes the logical prerequisite for the intervention of trust mechanisms in governance. Regarding the relationship between relational contracts and formal contracts, existing research has developed two perspectives: “substitution” and “complementarity.” The former argues that relational governance can fill the governance gaps left by formal contracts, reducing transactions’ reliance on rigid terms; the latter emphasizes that the two reinforce each other and function synergistically (Poppo and Zenger, 2002). This paper adopts the logic of substitution in the context of governance mechanism selection, positing that in transactions characterized by higher uncertainty—where formal contracts are more difficult to perfect—trust provides greater scope to substitute for formal contract governance and ultimately influences firm performance through transaction cost channels.

At the ex-ante stage, trust reduces the search, negotiation, and repeated contracting costs between the land trusteeship enterprise and dispersed farmers: drawing on established reputation and word-of-mouth referrals within acquaintance networks, the enterprise can conclude land trusteeship agreements without negotiating household by household, thereby raising both the contracting rate and the degree to which land under trusteeship is consolidated into contiguous parcels. At the in-process stage, trust economizes on monitoring and enforcement costs: the enterprise need not deploy substantial labor to supervise every operation merely to prove its service quality, and farmers likewise need not spend time following and inspecting field operations, so the process-governance investments of both parties decline simultaneously. At the ex post stage, trust curbs the costs of bargaining, dispute mediation, and even litigation that arise over the appraisal of operation quality and the attribution of yield losses; when external shocks occur, flexible consultation replaces rigid accountability, thereby lowering the adaptation and risk-bearing costs of the land trusteeship transaction.

2.2 Interest linkage mechanisms and their constituent elements

The interest linkage mechanism is not a single institutional arrangement but a process that unfolds within ongoing transactions between enterprises and farmers. Through contractual obligations, resource allocation and profit distribution it incentivizes and regulates the behavior of both parties, integrating dispersed actors into a relatively stable cooperative system (Tu and Long, 2017). We adopt the construct as it is used in the Chinese agribusiness and rural policy literature, where it has an established institutional referent (Du et al., 2020, 2021; Jiang, 2020), rather than importing a Western theoretical lens and relabeling it. Its theoretical status in this paper is therefore that of an institutionally grounded construct whose components are derived deductively from the functions that any exchange between asset-holding parties must perform under incomplete contracting: safeguarding the relationship, creating joint value, and dividing that value. Cooperative trust performs the safeguarding function; resource sharing performs the value-creation function; mutual benefit performs the value-appropriation function. This tripartite architecture, and not an inductive reading of the fieldwork, is what generates the three conditions analyzed below, and it is why candidates such as normative reciprocity, affective commitment or relative bargaining power are not treated as separate dimensions: they are attributes of the relationship that operate through one of the three functions rather than alongside them.

First, trust reduces monitoring costs, promotes information sharing and increases the resilience of cooperation. Where agricultural production is highly uncertain and effort is difficult to measure, formal contracts between an enterprise and a large number of dispersed smallholders are necessarily incomplete, and trust substitutes for the terms that cannot be written or enforced at reasonable cost (Poppo and Zenger, 2002; Xie and Xu, 2024). This substitution is the overarching mechanism of the paper.

Second, resource sharing captures the value created by differences in factor endowments. The enterprise brings capital, machinery, agronomic knowledge and market channels; the farmer brings land, labor and site-specific knowledge; their joint deployment raises attainable output because the assets are complementary rather than merely additive (Dyer and Singh, 1998; Zhu, 2026). Realizing that complementarity requires the assets to be structured, bundled and deployed together rather than simply accumulated, which is the substance of resource orchestration (Sirmon et al., 2011).

Third, mutually beneficial arrangements concern the fairness of profit distribution and the effectiveness of risk sharing (Du et al., 2020). Where distribution is unfair or risk-bearing is imbalanced, cooperation becomes unstable and enterprise performance is constrained (Cao and Zhang, 2018).

The interest linkage mechanism constitutes an institutional ecosystem in which the relations among its components, and changes in those relations, condition the returns of the actors within it (Du et al., 2021). Ideally every component would reach its highest level. In practice, differences in resource endowments, trusteeship models and relationships with farmers mean that the components develop unevenly, producing varying degrees of closeness in the linkage (Zhu, 2026). We conceptualize the relations among the three components as a self-reinforcing loop with positive feedback rather than as a set of pairwise associations, and we state the loop explicitly so that it can be assessed as a theoretical claim made in advance of the empirical analysis. Cooperative trust lowers the perceived hazard of committing specific assets, which makes resource sharing feasible; if enterprises and farmers fail to establish a virtuous cycle of cooperative trust, the trusteeship arrangement is unlikely to be sustained (Chen and Huang, 2022), whereas a well-established trust mechanism consolidates the stability of the linkage (Huan et al., 2022), and constraint mechanisms of this kind improve the quality of agricultural socialized services (Yu et al., 2026b). Resource sharing in turn enlarges the joint surplus and therefore the material basis on which mutual benefit can operate; without a surplus to divide, arrangements for mutual benefit have nothing to act upon (Bai et al., 2025). Mutual benefit closes the loop: the larger the share of the cooperative surplus that reaches each party, the stronger the incentive to continue committing resources and the higher the level of trust that the relationship can sustain (Yiwen et al., 2019; Ma et al., 2022). Two implications follow. Because the loop is self-reinforcing, a configuration in which two components are strong can compensate for a third that is weak, which is precisely the kind of substitution that a net-effects specification cannot represent. Because the loop is a claim about the dynamics of the relationship, and fsQCA establishes set-theoretic sufficiency at a point in time, the analysis that follows tests which combinations are sufficient for high performance.

On this basis we construct the configurational framework shown in Figure 1.

3 Empirical research design

3.1 Fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis

Corporate performance is a complex causal issue involving multiple concurrent factors. It requires not only an analysis of the direction and magnitude of the impact of interest linkage mechanisms on the performance of land trusteeship enterprises, but also an examination of how different combinations of the constituent elements of these mechanisms affect corporate performance. The impact of interest linkage mechanisms between land trusteeship enterprises and farmers on corporate performance is not a simple, symmetrical linear relationship between cause and effect, but rather one in which multiple conditions operate concurrently and interdependently. Regression analysis is unable to address issues such as the configuration effects of multiple conditional inter-dependencies and the asymmetry of causality (Douglas et al., 2020). Accordingly, this study employs a qualitative comparative analysis method to investigate the configuration effects of the interest linkage mechanisms on the business performance of land trusteeship enterprises.

Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) is a case-oriented research method based on techniques such as set theory and Boolean algebra (Ragin, 2008). Among its variants, fsQCA combines the strengths of qualitative and quantitative analysis, addressing concerns regarding the “generalizability” of qualitative analysis based on a small number of cases, while also compensating to some extent for the shortcomings of large-sample analysis in terms of qualitative changes and the analysis of phenomena. Unlike traditional regression methods, fsQCA utilizes Boolean algebra and does not require control variables (Fainshmidt et al., 2020). This method effectively overcomes complex methodological challenges such as heterogeneity between cases, asymmetric relationships, concurrent conditions and equifinal pathways.

3.2 Data sources

3.2.1 Sample selection

QCA cases are selected purposively rather than at random: the population is defined by the outcome of interest and cases are chosen so that the sample spans the relevant range of both conditions and outcome. We therefore selected 330 Chinese land trusteeship enterprises that had all established a functioning interest linkage mechanism with farmers but whose business performance differed. This secures homogeneity in the population definition together with heterogeneity in the conditions and the outcome. We note that, with 330 cases, this study belongs to the large-N branch of QCA rather than to the small-N case-oriented tradition with which the method is often associated, and we follow the guidance developed specifically for large-N applications on sampling, frequency thresholds and the treatment of limited diversity (Greckhamer et al., 2018). Accordingly, we use the term purposive rather than theoretical sampling, since the latter denotes an iterative case-selection procedure appropriate to small-N qualitative designs and not to a single-wave enterprise survey. The sample covers eastern, central and western provinces of China; it includes enterprises with nearly 20 years of operation alongside recent entrants, and registered capital ranging from the millions to the billions of yuan. The sample is thus diverse on the dimensions that plausibly condition the interest linkage mechanism.

3.2.2 Data collection

The author conducted interviews with the heads of 330 land trusteeship enterprises in the sample and distributed questionnaires to collect research data in 2022 and 2023 year. To effectively mitigate the issue of limited diversity, the number of antecedent variables should be commensurate with the sample size, ensuring that the number of condition combinations does not exceed the number of observations. In this study, the nine antecedent variables are reasonably aligned with the sample size and are unlikely to cause serious issues of limited diversity.

3.3 Measurement and calibration of variables

3.3.1 Selection of variables

Firstly, the outcome variable. This study selects the business performance of land trusteeship enterprises as the outcome variable, using the net profit of such enterprises in the survey year as the measure indicator, expressed in ten thousand yuan. Secondly, the condition variables. Based on the theoretical analysis presented earlier, this study selects cooperative trust, resource sharing and mutual benefit as condition variables. These are represented by indicators of the levels of cooperative trust, resource sharing and mutual benefit between land trusteeship enterprises and farmers. Furthermore, to further analyze the impact of the secondary indicators of interest linkage mechanism on the outcome variable, this study additionally analyzes the following as conditional variables: trust establishment, trust maintenance, trust reinforcement, dependency motivation, element arrangement, effect feedback, efficiency improvement, profit distribution, and risk sharing. Each construct was measured with multiple items rated on a Likert scale, and Cronbach’s alpha, composite reliability (CR), and average variance extracted (AVE) all fall within acceptable ranges.

3.3.2 Data calibration

This study employs the direct method to convert the raw data into fuzzy set membership scores within the (0.1) interval. The calibration information for the conditional and outcome variables is shown in Table 1.

Table 1. Calibration anchors for antecedents and outcomes.

Variable calibration is carried out using the direct method.

3.4 Testing the necessity of individual conditions

Using the fsQCA 3.0 software, we first examined whether individual conditions were necessary conditions for the business performance of land trusteeship enterprises. If a particular condition is always present when the outcome of high business performance is observed, then that condition is a necessary condition for high business performance. An important criterion for determining necessity is the level of consistency. When consistency exceeds 0.9 and Relevance of Necessity (RoN) exceeds 0.5 (Schneider and Wagemann, 2012), the condition is deemed a necessary condition for the outcome (Ragin and Fiss, 2008). The results of the test for necessary conditions for high and low business performance of land trusteeship enterprises are shown in Table 2. While some conditions exhibit relatively high RoN values—ranging from 0.62 to 0.64 for high performance and from 0.81 to 0.87 for low performance—their corresponding consistency scores fall well below the 0.9 threshold. Therefore, no single condition can be deemed a necessary condition for the outcome, confirming that a configurational approach is appropriate for analyzing the interest linkage mechanisms in land trusteeship.

Table 2. Analysis of the necessity of individual conditions.

Round to two decimal places.

4 Empirical results and analysis

4.1 Analysis of the adequacy of condition configurations

4.1.1 Analysis of first-level indicators of the interest linkage mechanism

Unlike the analysis of necessary conditions described above, configuration analysis seeks to reveal the sufficiency of different configurations in producing an outcome. Before conducting a configuration analysis, it is necessary to set a consistency threshold and a case frequency threshold. These thresholds are established to exclude combinations of conditions that lack representativeness and generalizability. Consistency is also used to measure the sufficiency of configurations, but the minimum acceptable standard and calculation method differ from those used in the analysis of necessary conditions. The consistency level determining sufficiency should not be lower than 0.75 (Schneider and Wagemann, 2012). In this study, the consistency threshold is set at 0.80, while the PRI consistency threshold is set at 0.70. The frequency threshold should be determined based on sample size. For small to medium-sized samples, the frequency threshold is set at 1, whereas for large samples, it should be greater than 1. In this study, the frequency threshold has been set at 1.

All analyses were conducted using fsQCA 3.0 software. The software was operated on a Windows platform with default algorithmic settings unless otherwise specified. The sufficiency analysis proceeded in two distinct stages. In the first stage, a truth table was constructed by assigning each case to the configuration row with the highest membership score. The truth table was then reduced using the above frequency, consistency and PRI threshold. In the second stage, the standard analysis procedure was applied to the dichotomized truth table to derive the complex, parsimonious, and intermediate solutions. Counterfactual analysis was guided by theoretical expectations regarding the directional influence of each condition on the outcome. The intermediate solution, which incorporates theoretically informed directional assumptions, is reported as the primary result, following established practice (Fiss, 2011). Core conditions were identified as those appearing in both the parsimonious and intermediate solutions, while peripheral conditions appeared only in the intermediate solution. The results of the condition configuration analysis are shown in Table 3.

Table 3. Results of condition configuration.

Large symbols denote core conditions and small symbols peripheral conditions; “●” indicates the presence of a condition and “⊗” its absence; a blank cell indicates that the condition may be either present or absent. The same convention applies to all subsequent tables.

As can be seen from the Table 3. Firstly, in configuration C1, resource sharing is the core condition, while cooperative trust is the peripheral condition. The consistency of this configuration is 0.87, with an original coverage of 0.54 and a unique coverage of 0.12. This indicates that this pathway can explain approximately 54% of cases where land trusteeship enterprises have improved their business performance, while approximately 12% of such cases can only be explained by this pathway. The fundamental logic of this configuration is that resource sharing plays a central role in improving the business performance of land trusteeship enterprises, while cooperative trust plays a supporting role. This suggests that for enterprises to improve their business performance, the key lies in achieving resource sharing between land trusteeship enterprises and farmers, supplemented by enhanced cooperative trust between them, so that they can jointly expand the “pie.”

Secondly, in configuration C2, mutual benefit is the core condition, while cooperative trust is the peripheral condition. The fundamental logic of this configuration is that mutual benefit plays a central role in improving the business performance of land trusteeship enterprises, while cooperative trust serves a supporting function. This suggests that high business performance in this configuration is associated with an equitable distribution of land trusteeship revenues between the enterprise and farmers; the division of the surplus, rather than its creation, is the margin on which this pathway operates. Furthermore, it is necessary to strengthen the relationship of cooperative trust between land trusteeship enterprises and farmers.

Thirdly, in configuration C3, resource sharing is the core condition, while mutual benefit is a peripheral condition. The fundamental logic of this configuration is that a lack of resource sharing plays a central role in the decline of business performance in land trusteeship enterprises, while a lack of mutual benefit plays a secondary role. This suggests that, whatever the level of cooperative trust between the enterprise and farmers, the absence of resource sharing is associated with low business performance: where complementary assets are not deployed jointly, no surplus is generated on which the relationship could sustain itself.

In the fourth configuration C4, mutual benefit is the core condition, while resource sharing is a peripheral condition. The fundamental logic of this configuration is that a lack of mutual benefit plays a central role in the decline of business performance in land trusteeship enterprises, while a lack of resource sharing plays a supporting role. This suggests that however well cooperative trust is established between the enterprise and farmers, an inequitable division of the surplus is associated with low business performance, and that the failure of the value-appropriation function is the condition carrying this pathway.

Fifth, in configuration C5, cooperative trust is the core condition, while resource sharing is a peripheral condition. The fundamental logic of this configuration is that low levels of cooperative trust play a central role in the decline of business performance in land trusteeship enterprises, while a lack of resource sharing plays a supporting role. This suggests that however the surplus is divided, low business performance is observed where cooperative trust is not established. Without the safeguarding function, arrangements for sharing resources and for dividing the surplus have no stable basis on which to operate, which is the substantive content of trust acting as a substitute for incomplete formal contracting.

In summary, based on the conditional configurations of the sub-indicators for the farmer interest linkage mechanism, the “cooperative trust and resource sharing” pathway, the “cooperative trust and mutual benefit” pathway are the conditional configurations that enable land trusteeship enterprises to enhance their business performance. This indicates that high business performance in land trusteeship enterprises is inseparable from a mechanism of cooperative trust between the enterprises and farmers. However, cooperative trust alone is insufficient to achieve high business performance. Building upon the foundation of cooperative trust between land trusteeship enterprise and farmers, at least one of the following is required: resource sharing or mutual benefit. If land trusteeship enterprise and farmers possess both resource sharing and mutual benefit mechanisms but lack the value of cooperative trust, the land trusteeship enterprise will still be unable to achieve high business performance. This is likely because trust is the cornerstone of cooperation; once trust between the enterprise and farmers is lost, the land trusteeship partnership faces the risk of breach of contract, and improving the enterprise’s business performance becomes a futile endeavor. This is precisely the “bottom line” that enterprises must strictly adhere to. The reasons for the success and failure of land trusteeship enterprises differ. As the saying goes, there are a thousand paths to success, but only one path to failure. Here, we have analyzed the causes of both success and failure from both positive and negative perspectives, something that regression analysis alone cannot achieve.

4.1.2 Analysis of sub-indicators for the interest linkage mechanism

To gain a deeper understanding of the underlying factors influencing the business performance of enterprises engaged in land trusteeship, this study further analyses the configuration effects of the sub-indicators under the interest linkage mechanism on the business performance of such enterprises. Similarly, using the same methods, anchors and thresholds as in the preceding section, with land trusteeship enterprise profit as the outcome variable and trust establishment, trust maintenance, trust reinforcement, dependency motivation, element arrangement, effect feedback, efficiency improvement, profit distribution and risk sharing as antecedent conditions, the resulting condition configurations are shown in Table 4.

Table 4. Configuration results for high business performance conditions.

As shown in Table 4, the consistency index for the overall solution of the conditional configuration is 0.98, which is higher than the consistency threshold of 0.8. The overall coverage for the group of enterprises with high land trusteeship performance is 0.60. These results indicate that the conditional configuration possesses strong overall explanatory power, and the findings are valid and reliable. The following section presents an analysis of the conditional configuration effects for the group of enterprises with high land trusteeship performance.

Firstly, in configuration C1, trust maintenance, trust reinforcement and dependency motivation are core conditions, while element arrangement is a peripheral condition. The fundamental logic of this configuration is that trust maintenance, trust reinforcement and dependency motivation play a central role in improving the business performance of land trusteeship enterprises, while the arrangement of elements serves a supporting function. This indicates that high business performance in this configuration is associated with trust maintenance, stronger trust relationships with all participating parties during the trusteeship process, and attention to farmers’ dependency motivations, supplemented by a coherent arrangement of trusteeship resources.

Secondly, in configuration C2, trust maintenance, trust reinforcement and dependency motivation are core conditions, while feedback on results and efficiency improvement are peripheral conditions. The fundamental logic of this configuration is that trust maintenance, trust reinforcement and dependency motivation play a central role in improving the business performance of land trusteeship enterprises, while effect feedback and efficiency improvement play a supporting role. This indicates that high business performance in this configuration is associated with trust maintenance, the reinforcement of trust with all participating stakeholders during the trusteeship process, and attention to farmers’ dependency motivation. This should be supplemented by a robust effect feedback system, alongside efforts to reduce production costs and increase agricultural output.

Thirdly, in configuration C3, trust-building, trust reinforcement, dependency motivation and effect feedback are core conditions, while risk sharing is a peripheral condition. The fundamental logic of this configuration is that trust building, trust reinforcement, dependency motivation and effect feedback play a central role in improving the business performance of land trusteeship enterprises, while risk sharing plays a supporting role. This indicates that high business performance in this configuration is associated with enterprises establishing trust and reaching consensus with farmers, reinforcing trust with all participating parties during the trusteeship process, catering to farmers’ motivations for trusteeship and providing effective feedback, while supplementing these efforts with a reasonable risk sharing mechanism.

Fourthly, in configuration C4, trust maintenance and dependency motivation are core conditions, while profit distribution and risk sharing are peripheral conditions. The fundamental logic of this configuration is that trust maintenance and dependency motivation play a central role in improving the business performance of land trusteeship enterprises, while profit distribution and risk sharing play a supporting role. This indicates that high business performance in this configuration is associated with the maintenance of trust and with meeting farmers’ dependency motives, supplemented by fair profit distribution and risk sharing schemes. When land trusteeship enterprises fulfil their commitments and establish reliable cooperative relationships, farmers are more inclined to collaborate with them and demonstrate greater engagement and enthusiasm. Farmers’ dependence on and expectations of land trusteeship enterprises will encourage them to cooperate with these enterprises and work together to achieve operational objectives. Furthermore, fair and reasonable profit distribution schemes ensure that farmers receive a fair return, thereby stimulating greater enthusiasm and effort on their part. At the same time, the reasonable sharing of risks reduces farmers’ perception of risk, increasing their trust in the partnership and their willingness to cooperate.

Fifth, in configuration C5, trust maintenance, element arrangement, effect feedback, profit distribution and risk sharing are core conditions, while trust-building is a peripheral condition. The fundamental logic of this framework is that trust maintenance, resource allocation, effect feedback, profit distribution and risk sharing play a central role in improving the business performance of land trusteeship enterprises, while trust-building serves a supporting role. This indicates that high business performance in this configuration is associated with trust maintenance, a coherent allocation of resources and effective feedback within the trusteeship process, together with an appropriate distribution of profits and risks, all resting on established cooperative trust. Specifically, trust maintenance consolidates the cooperative relationship, element arrangement supports the efficient use of resources, effect feedback guides the enterprise in adjusting its operational strategy, and profit distribution and risk sharing sustain farmers’ willingness to participate. Concurrently, as a supporting condition, trust-building provides the foundation for cooperation between land trusteeship enterprises and farmers. Establishing cooperative trust and consensus facilitates the smooth progression of cooperation between the two parties, enhancing the stability and effectiveness of the partnership.

Sixth, in configuration C6, element arrangement and effect feedback are core conditions, while trust reinforcement, dependent motivation, and efficiency improvement are peripheral conditions. The fundamental logic of this configuration is that the elements arrangement and effect feedback play a central role in improving the performance of land trusteeship operations, while trust reinforcement, dependency motivation and efficiency improvement play a supporting role. This indicates that high performance in this configuration is associated with enterprises arranging the trusteeship elements coherently and providing effective feedback on outcomes. This should be supplemented by strengthening trust relationships between land trusteeship enterprises and other stakeholders, catering to farmers’ motivations for trusteeship, reducing agricultural production costs and increasing benefits.

Seventh, in configuration C7, trust-building and trust-maintenance are core conditions, while trust reinforcement, dependent motivation, element arrangement, effect feedback, efficiency improvement, profit distribution, and risk sharing are peripheral conditions. The fundamental logic of this configuration is that trust-building and trust-maintenance play a central role in enhancing the business performance of land trusteeship enterprises, while trust-reinforcement, dependency motivation, element arrangement, effect feedback, efficiency improvement, profit distribution, and risk sharing play a supporting role. This indicates that high performance in this configuration is associated with enterprises maintaining trust and reaching a working consensus with farmers. This should be supplemented by strengthening the trust relationship between land trusteeship enterprises and other stakeholders, catering to farmers’ motivations for trusteeship, rationally organizing the trusteeship elements, providing effective feedback on outcomes, realizing cost savings and efficiency improvement, and ensuring the fair distribution of benefits and sharing of risks.

In summary, the nine-condition analysis identifies seven combinations that are sufficient for high business performance, each requiring at least four conditions to be present. Two features of this result connect back to the framework. First, the recurrence of trust maintenance and of dependency motivation across the configurations reproduces at the sub-component level the pattern found at the first-order level: the safeguarding function is present in almost every recipe, while the value-creation and value-appropriation sub-components that accompany it vary. Second, the requirement that at least four sub-components be present is what resource orchestration would predict. Assets and relational endowments do not generate returns when they are merely accumulated; they generate returns when they are structured, bundled and deployed in combination, so that the productive value of any one sub-component depends on the presence of others (Sirmon et al., 2011). This also implies diminishing returns to investing in any single sub-component while the others remain undeveloped, which is the practical significance of the finding for enterprises allocating scarce managerial attention.

4.2 Heterogeneity analysis

4.2.1 Heterogeneity of land trusteeship models

In practice, there is a wide variety of models for land trusteeship enterprises. In addition to direct engagement between enterprises and farmers, enterprises may introduce intermediaries to reduce transaction costs with farmers. These intermediaries may include cooperatives, village collectives, supply and marketing cooperatives, or large-scale professional farmers. The choice of land trusteeship model entails different costs and benefits for enterprises, which in turn affects their business performance. Therefore, it is necessary to distinguish between these models and investigate the preconditions that influence corporate performance. Based on the actual conditions in the study area, this research has identified three typical land trusteeship models: the “enterprise + farmer” model, the “enterprise + cooperative + farmer” model, and the “enterprise + village collective + farmer” model. Consequently, this study has divided the sample cases into three sub-samples to conduct conditional configuration analysis on each in turn.

4.2.1.1 The “enterprise + farmer” model

The results of the conditional configuration under the “enterprise + farmer” model are shown in Table 5. It can be seen that both the overall consistency and overall coverage of the global solution for the conditional configuration are high, indicating that the conditional configuration has strong explanatory power and that the results are valid and reliable. In this land trusteeship model, configuration C1 represents the pathway for improving the business performance of land trusteeship enterprises. Here, mutual benefit is the core condition, while cooperative trust is the peripheral condition. The fundamental logic of this configuration is that mutual benefit plays a central role in enhancing the business performance of land trusteeship enterprises, with cooperative trust playing a supporting role. This suggests that high business performance in this group is associated with enterprises and farmers sharing the value added by trusteeship on terms both accept, supplemented by cooperative trust.

Table 5. Results of condition configuration under the “enterprise + farmer” model.

4.2.1.2 The “enterprise + cooperative + farmer” model

The results of the conditional configuration analysis under the “enterprise + cooperative + farmer” model are shown in Table 6. Under this land trusteeship model, configurations C1 and C2 represent pathways for improving the business performance of land trusteeship enterprises. In configuration C1, cooperative trust is the core condition and resource sharing is a peripheral condition. The fundamental logic of this configuration is that cooperative trust plays a central role in enhancing the business performance of land trusteeship, while resource sharing plays a supporting role. This indicates that high business performance in this group is associated with established cooperative trust between the enterprise and farmers, supplemented by the complementary use of resources by both parties; where the complement is absent, the safeguarding function alone does not deliver high performance. In configuration C2, resource sharing is the core condition and cooperative trust is a peripheral condition. This indicates that the core condition here is an arrangement for the complementary deployment of trusteeship resources by enterprises and farmers, supported by cooperative trust between the two parties.

Table 6. Condition configuration under the “enterprise + cooperative + farmer” model.

4.2.1.3 The “enterprise + village collective + farmer” model

The results of the conditional configuration under the “enterprise + village collective + farmer” model are shown in Table 7. It can be seen that, under this land trusteeship model, configuration C1, C2 and C3 represent pathways for improving the business performance of land trusteeship enterprises. In configuration C1, resource sharing is the core condition, while mutual benefit is the peripheral condition. The consistency of this configuration is 1, with an original coverage of 0.50 and a unique coverage of 0.09. This indicates that this pathway can explain approximately 50% of cases where the business performance of land trusteeship enterprises has improved, while approximately 9% of such cases can only be explained by this pathway. This suggests that high business performance in this group is associated with resource sharing between the enterprise and farmers, supplemented by mutual benefit. In configuration C2, mutual benefit is the core condition, while resource sharing is a peripheral condition. This indicates that the core condition here is an equitable division of the returns between enterprises and farmers, supplemented by the joint deployment of trusteeship resources by the two parties. In configuration C3, cooperative trust is the core condition, while mutual benefit is the peripheral condition. This indicates that high performance in this group is associated with established cooperative trust between enterprises and farmers, supplemented by an equitable division of the returns.

Table 7. Condition configuration under “enterprise+village collective+farmer” model.

In summary, with regard to the heterogeneity of land trusteeship models, under the “enterprise + farmer” model a “cooperative trust and mutual benefit” type of interest linkage mechanism is sufficient for high enterprise performance. Under the “enterprise + cooperative + farmer” model a “cooperative trust and resource sharing” type is sufficient. Under the “enterprise + village collective + farmer” model both the “cooperative trust and mutual benefit” and the “resource sharing and mutual benefit” types are sufficient. Once an intermediary organization is present, therefore, resource sharing becomes the component that distinguishes high from low performers. This also accounts for the rationale of the intermediary-based models: third-party organizations are introduced precisely to resolve the interface problem between enterprises and a large number of dispersed households, and without them the assets held by the two sides remain in separate silos and cannot be deployed jointly.

4.2.2 Heterogeneity in the service item

Different items of land trusteeship service involve different machinery, inputs and farmer requirements, so an enterprise’s costs and revenues may vary with the particular items supplied. Accordingly, this study classifies enterprises as single-item, multi-item or full-item service providers according to the number of items covered, such as plowing, sowing, pest control and harvesting. Then we analyze the differences in the conditions required to improve the business performance of these three types of enterprises.

4.2.2.1 Analysis of the configuration of conditions for single-item

The results of the condition configuration for single-item service enterprises are shown in Table 8. It can be seen that the pathways for improving the business performance of land trusteeship enterprises are configuration C1 and C2. In configuration C1, resource sharing is the core condition. This indicates that high business performance in this group is associated with resource sharing between the enterprise and farmers. In configuration C2, mutual benefit is the core condition, while cooperative trust is a peripheral condition. This indicates that the core condition is an equitable division of the returns from trusteeship between enterprise and farmers, supplemented by a higher level of cooperative trust between the two parties.

Table 8. Configuration results for single-item service conditions in enterprises.

4.2.2.2 Analysis of configuration of multi-item service

The configuration results for multi-item service enterprises are shown in Table 9. It can be seen that configuration C1 represents a pathway for improving the performance of land trusteeship enterprises. Resource sharing is the core condition, while cooperative trust is the peripheral condition. The fundamental logic of this configuration is that resource sharing plays a central role in improving the business performance of land trusteeship enterprises, while cooperative trust plays a supporting role. Configuration C2 represents the pathway leading to low business performance. This indicates that even if enterprises and farmers achieve cooperative trust in land trusteeship cooperation, if they fail to establish mutual benefit and resource sharing in the process, improvements in the business performance of land trusteeship enterprises cannot be realized.

Table 9. Configuration results for multi-item service conditions in enterprises.

4.2.2.3 Analysis of the configuration of full-item service

The results of the condition configuration for full-item service enterprises are shown in Table 10. It can be seen that configuration C1 represents the pathway leading to high business performance in land trusteeship enterprises. Among these, cooperative trust is the core condition, while resource sharing and mutual economic benefit are peripheral conditions. This suggests that high business performance in this group is associated with established cooperative trust between the enterprise and farmers, which provides the safeguarding function on which the remaining components rest. This must be supplemented by complementary trusteeship resources and mutual benefit between both parties. Configuration C2 represents the pathway leading to low business performance in land trusteeship enterprises. The fundamental logic of this configuration is that a lack of resource sharing plays a central role in the decline of business performance, while low levels of cooperative trust play a supporting role.

Table 10. Configuration results for full-item service conditions in enterprises.

In summary, with regard to the heterogeneity of service items, a “cooperative trust and mutual benefit” interest linkage mechanism is sufficient for high business performance in single-item service enterprises; a “cooperative trust and resource sharing” mechanism is sufficient in multi-item service enterprises; and a “cooperative trust, resource sharing and mutual benefit” mechanism is sufficient in full-item service enterprises. The broader the service portfolio a land trusteeship enterprise covers, therefore, the more components of the mechanism have to be in place at once. As the number of service items increases so do the resources that must be coordinated, which raises the value of resource sharing between enterprise and farmers. In moving from multi-item to full-item service the enterprise also assumes greater responsibility for agricultural output and bears a share of operational risk, which is why mutual benefit becomes indispensable rather than optional.

4.3 Robustness tests

4.3.1 Verification of changes to calibration anchors

The robustness of QCA results can be assessed by examining the differences in the membership status and fitting parameters across different configurations. This study employed a method involving the alteration of calibration anchor points to test for robustness. In this study, the upper quartile (75th percentile), median (50th percentile) and lower quartile (25th percentile) of the descriptive statistics for the samples were set as calibration anchors. The calibration anchors for antecedents and outcomes are shown in Table 11.

Table 11. Calibration anchors for antecedents and outcomes.

This study sets the consistency threshold at 0.80, the PRI consistency threshold at 0.70, and the case frequency threshold at 1. High and low business performance are used as outcome variables, while cooperative trust, resource sharing, and mutual benefit are used as antecedent conditions. Conditions identified in the reduced solution are defined as core conditions, while those appearing in the intermediate solution but excluded from the reduced solution are defined as peripheral conditions. The results are shown in Table 12. It can be seen that, following the change in the calibration anchor, the set relationships of the condition configurations for high and low corporate performance have not undergone significant changes. The consistency, original coverage, and unique coverage of the single solution for the condition configurations, as well as the overall consistency and overall coverage of the global solution, show only minor changes. Robustness tests following the modification of the calibration anchor indicate that the results remain robust.

Table 12. Results of the robustness test for modified calibration anchors.

4.3.2 Test for changes in parameter thresholds

This study employs the method of varying parameter thresholds to conduct robustness tests. The consistency threshold set in the preceding section is 0.80, the PRI consistency threshold is 0.70, and the case frequency threshold is (1) In this study, the consistency threshold was raised from 0.80 to 0.85, the PRI consistency threshold was increased to 0.75, and the case frequency threshold was raised to (2) High and low corporate performance were used as outcome variables, with cooperative trust, resource sharing and mutual benefit serving as antecedent conditions. The condition configuration results are shown in Table 13. It can be seen that, following the adjustment of the relevant parameter thresholds, the set relationships between the condition configurations for high and low corporate performance have not undergone significant changes. The consistency, original coverage, and unique coverage of the single solution for the conditional configurations, as well as the overall consistency and overall coverage of the global solution, showed only minor changes. Robustness tests for the modified parameter thresholds indicated that the results remain robust.

Table 13. Results of robustness tests for parameter threshold adjustments.

The results for the sub-indicators of the interest linkage mechanism are shown in Table 14. It can be seen that the number of condition configurations decreased by one, while the relationship status of the other condition configuration sets remained largely unchanged. This is attributable to the reduction in the number of samples meeting the requirements in the truth table following the increase in the parameter threshold. The consistency, original coverage and unique coverage of the single solution for the conditional configuration, as well as the overall consistency and overall coverage of the global solution, show only minor changes. So, the aforementioned conditional configuration is reliable.

Table 14. Robustness tests for parameter threshold adjustments (high business performance).

Due to space constraints, the results of the robustness tests for the thresholds used in the analysis of changes in low business performance are not included here.

5 Discussion

These interpretations invite comparison with evidence from other agricultural contexts. The finding that relational governance substitutes for formal contracting where measurement is costly is consistent with work on contract farming, in which trust and repeated dealing are repeatedly found to sustain arrangements that written contracts cannot enforce; the finding that the internal governance of intermediary organizations conditions what the wider arrangement can achieve is consistent with the European evidence on agricultural cooperatives, where changes in internal decision rights alter what cooperatives are able to organize on behalf of members (Bijman et al., 2014). What is distinctive in our results is not the presence of these mechanisms but their ordering: the identity of the binding constraint moves as the architecture changes, which is visible only when the components are examined in combination.

Scope conditions should be stated explicitly, given that the study is framed in relation to globally defined objectives. Chinese land trusteeship is institutionally distinctive: collective land ownership with household use rights, village collectives holding an administrative as well as an economic role, and a policy environment actively promoting service-driven scale operation. Some of what we report is bound to that setting. The specific role of the village collective as an intermediary, and the availability of administrative channels for organizing smallholders, has no direct analogue in most contract-farming or land-leasing systems, and the configurations reported for the enterprise-village collective model should be treated as institutionally contingent. Other elements are more portable. The proposition that trust substitutes for incomplete contracting under production uncertainty, the proposition that the identity of the binding governance constraint shifts with the presence of an aggregating intermediary, and the proposition that broader service scope requires the joint presence of safeguarding, value-creation and value-appropriation mechanisms are statements about the structure of agricultural exchange rather than about Chinese institutions specifically. They are testable in contract farming, in machinery rings and cooperative service arrangements, and in custom-harvesting markets. We would expect them to hold where smallholders are numerous, production is uncertain and monitoring is costly, and to hold poorly where farm consolidation has already reduced the number of counterparties to a level at which formal contracts are enforceable cheaply.

5.1 Trust as a governance substitute: the mechanism common to the configurations

The configurations reported are not a list of unrelated recipes, and they can be read through the single mechanism. Where production is seasonal, weather-dependent and difficult to monitor at the plot level, contracts between a trusteeship enterprise and a large number of dispersed smallholders are necessarily incomplete, and cooperative trust operates as a substitute safeguard for the terms that cannot be written or enforced at reasonable cost (Poppo and Zenger, 2002; Xie and Xu, 2024). This is why cooperative trust is present in both configurations that are sufficient for high performance even though the necessity analysis does not identify it as necessary: trust does not by itself generate returns, it lowers the cost at which the other two components can be operated. The finding refines rather than confirms the standard relational governance argument. That literature debates whether trust and formal contracts are substitutes or complements at the level of the dyad; our results suggest that the question is better posed at the level of the configuration, because what trust substitutes for is not the contract as such but the monitoring and enforcement capacity that a contract would have to supply in order for asset commitment or surplus division to be workable.

The two complements differ in the function they perform once that cost has been lowered. Resource sharing addresses value creation: the enterprise contributes machinery, agronomic knowledge, credit and market access, the farmer contributes land, labor and site-specific knowledge, and their joint deployment raises the total surplus because the assets are complementary rather than merely additive (Dyer and Singh, 1998). Mutual benefit addresses value appropriation: it determines how that surplus, and the risk attached to it, is divided. Configuration C1 shows that an enterprise can reach high profit by combining safeguarding with value creation while withholding an equitable division; configuration C2 shows that it can also do so by combining safeguarding with an equitable division in the absence of deep asset complementarity. The theoretical point that the configurational evidence supports, and that a net-effects specification would obscure, is therefore that trust is not one antecedent among three but the enabling condition on which the productive value of the other two depends. This extends configurational governance research by identifying the internal division of labor within a governance arrangement, rather than treating its elements as interchangeable ingredients of a recipe.

5.2 Equifinality and causal asymmetry of a configurational lens

5.2.1 The first is equifinality

Table 3 identifies two distinct routes to the same outcome, and the sub-sample analyses identify further routes within particular populations. This multiplicity is not an artefact of a permissive threshold; it reflects the fact that land trusteeship enterprises operate under genuinely different constraint sets. An enterprise working where land is fragmented and machinery scarce has a large gain available from asset complementarity, and resource sharing is the binding margin. An enterprise working where machinery services are already commoditized has little complementarity left to exploit and competes instead on the terms it offers, which makes the division of surplus the binding margin. Equifinality is thus the empirical signature of heterogeneous scarcity, and it is the reason a single prescription addressed to all enterprises is unlikely to be useful.

5.2.2 The second property is causal asymmetry

The configurations associated with low performance are not the logical negations of those associated with high performance. C3 and C4 combine the absence of resource sharing with the absence of mutual benefit and leave cooperative trust free to vary, while C5 is driven by the absence of trust. The asymmetry is substantive: high performance requires a specific pairing of the safeguarding function with at least one productive complement, whereas low performance can be produced by the failure of any one of several components independently. Failure is more weakly constrained than success. This is why the two questions - what produces high performance, and what produces low performance - have to be asked separately, and it is why an enterprise cannot infer what will protect it from failure by reversing the recipe for success. A regression specification, which forces the coefficient on a condition to carry the same magnitude and the opposite sign for the presence and the absence of that condition, cannot represent this pattern; it would report an average effect of trust and an average effect of resource sharing and would leave the reader unable to distinguish C1 from C2, or either from the low-performance solution.

5.3 Limitations and directions for future research

This study has several limitations. First, the cross-sectional design limits causal inference, and the possibility of reverse causality cannot be ruled out. Second, reliance on a single respondent for all data may introduce common method bias. Third, the lack of triangulation with data from farmers represents a significant methodological limitation, as their perceptions may differ from those of enterprise managers. Finally, the findings are contextualized within China’s land trusteeship system, and their generalizability to other agricultural settings should be made with caution. Future research should employ longitudinal and matched-pair data from multiple sources to address these limitations and test the portability of our findings.

6 Conclusions and implications

6.1 Research conclusions

Against the backdrop of the rapid expansion of commercial capital into rural areas, improving the business performance of land trusteeship enterprises has become a pressing issue. Adopting the perspective of the interest linkage mechanism, this paper uses survey data from 330 land trusteeship enterprises and fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis to identify the combinations of trust, resource sharing and mutual benefit that are sufficient for high and for low business performance. It further examines heterogeneity across trusteeship models and service breadth, and reports robustness tests based on alternative calibration anchors and parameter thresholds. The main findings are as follows.

• (1) Overall, no individual element of the interest linkage mechanism is a necessary condition for high business performance. Two configurations are sufficient for it: “cooperative trust and resource sharing,” and “cooperative trust and mutual benefit.” The configurations sufficient for low business performance are structurally distinct from the negation of these two.
• (2) With regard to the heterogeneity of land trusteeship models, under the “enterprise + farmer” model the “cooperative trust and mutual benefit” type of interest linkage mechanism is sufficient for high business performance. Under the “enterprise + cooperative + farmer” model the “cooperative trust and resource sharing” type is sufficient. Under the “enterprise + village collective + farmer” model both the “cooperative trust and mutual benefit” and the “resource sharing and mutual benefit” types are sufficient.
• (3) With regard to the heterogeneity of service items, a “cooperative trust and mutual benefit” type of interest linkage mechanism is sufficient for high business performance in enterprises providing a single service item. A “cooperative trust and resource sharing” type is sufficient for high business performance in enterprises providing multiple service items. A “cooperative trust, resource sharing and mutual benefit” type is sufficient for high business performance in enterprises providing full-item land trusteeship services. The broader the service portfolio, the more of the mechanism must be in place simultaneously.

6.2 Managerial and policy implications

• (1) Recognize that not every pathway is accessible to every enterprise. The resource-sharing pathways presuppose a minimum asset base and an intermediary capable of aggregating land and operations; a small enterprise in a village without an active cooperative or collective cannot reach them regardless of managerial intent. The mutual-benefit pathways presuppose enough margin to concede, which enterprises operating at or below break-even do not have, and the full-item configuration presupposes the capital and the risk-bearing capacity to assume responsibility for a whole production cycle. Stating these prerequisites matters because the alternative - treating every identified configuration as universally attainable - reproduces exactly the generic prescription that a configurational analysis is intended to replace.
• (2) Where managerial attention is scarce, the defensible sequence is therefore to secure the safeguarding function first - contract reliability, transparent communication about operations and pricing, honoring commitments in a bad season - and then to invest in whichever complement the matrix identifies for the enterprise’s context. This is not a claim that trust matters more in a variance sense; it is a claim that the returns to the other two components are conditional on it, which is why an enterprise that invests in shared machinery while its reputation for honoring commitments is weak is likely to find the investment unproductive.
• (3) Differentiate the implications across the actors in the trusteeship system. For cooperatives and village collectives, the results assign a specific function rather than a general one: these organizations change which governance mechanism binds, by making asset complementarity organizable at acceptable cost. Their value to the system therefore lies in aggregation and scheduling capacity - consolidating land into contiguous operating units, unifying agronomic timetables, acting as a single counterparty - rather than in adding a further layer of negotiation.

For policymakers, three implications follow. Support directed at machinery and information infrastructure raises the ceiling on the resource-sharing pathways and is most valuable where an intermediary already exists to organize it. Support directed at contract templates, dispute resolution and disclosure of trusteeship terms raises the floor on the mutual-benefit pathways and is most valuable where enterprises contract with households directly. And programs that evaluate land trusteeship on enterprise financial performance alone should be complemented by indicators measured on the farmer side - realized returns per hectare, contract renewal rates, the incidence of disputes - so that arrangements generating enterprise profit through asymmetric appropriation can be distinguished from those generating it through joint value creation.

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Footnotes

Edited by: Justice Gameli Djokoto, Dominion University College, Ghana

Reviewed by: Ravi Kumar Bommisetti, Akal University, India

Nejib Fattam, Consultant in logistics and SCM, Germany