**1. Introduction**

With the tightening of resource and environmental constraints, problems such as disordered spatial distribution of rural land, inefficient use of resources, and deterioration of the ecological environment have become increasingly prominent [1–3]. The traditional land consolidation model that takes a single element as the consolidation object has been unable to cope with the continuous comprehensive problems in the process of rural development [4,5]. Under the background of the rural revitalization strategy, land consolidation has expanded from the single agricultural land consolidation to the comprehensive consolidation of the whole elements of "mountains, rivers, forests, fields, lakes, grasses and sand" [6–10]. The overall promotion of comprehensive land consolidation will help gradually narrow the gap between urban and rural development, stimulate the internal driving force of rural development, coordinate the harmonious development of man and nature, and ultimately achieve comprehensive rural revitalization [11–14].

As an important part of land consolidation project management, the decision-making is the basis of scientifically selecting land consolidation projects, ensuring the quality of project, and making the project advance in an orderly manner [15,16]. In recent years,

**Citation:** Xia, W.; Yang, G.

Decision-Making Evaluation of the Pilot Project of Comprehensive Land Consolidation from the Perspective of Farmers and Social Investors: A Case Study of the Project Applied in Xianning City, Hubei Province, in 2020. *Land* **2022**, *11*, 1534. https:// doi.org/10.3390/land11091534

Academic Editors: Yongsheng Wang, Qi Wen, Dazhuan Ge and Bangbang Zhang

Received: 26 August 2022 Accepted: 8 September 2022 Published: 10 September 2022

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China's annual investment in land consolidation has reached hundreds of billions of Yuan [17]. However, due to the characteristics of large capital demand and long return time for comprehensive land consolidation, the supply of consolidation funds is still difficult to meet its demand. Western countries also face the limitation of funds [18], so they will strictly allocate the limited funds to the most suitable areas in the land consolidation project initiation stage to ensure effective resource management and successful financial support [2,19]. In order to solve the problem of the shortage of funds for comprehensive land consolidation, the Ministry of Natural Resources strongly advocates and encourages social capital to participate in comprehensive land consolidation and ecological restoration, and local governments also actively explore ways to attract social capital to comprehensive land consolidation. In the case of insufficient government financial funds, how to leverage or attract social capital to participate and ensure the high-quality implementation of comprehensive land consolidation projects has become an important issue to be solved in the decision-making of comprehensive land consolidation projects.

To attract social capital to participate in comprehensive land consolidation projects, the most important thing is to understand the interests of social investors and set up projects with high investment willingness of social investors so as to attract investment from social investors. At present, the academic research on the decision-making of land consolidation project mainly starts from the perspective of land [9,19,20], and there is relatively little literature on the decision-making of land consolidation projects from the perspective of the microsubject of the social capital. With the gradual development of land consolidation work, some scholars have found that mandatory land consolidation has adverse effects on farmers [21], and land consolidation should fully respect the dominant position of farmers [19,22–24]. In some places, in the process of social investors' participation in comprehensive land consolidation, the phenomenon of damage to the rights of farmers also appeared. Therefore, the decision-making of a comprehensive land consolidation project should not only consider the interests of the investor, namely the social capital, but also the rights of local farmers. Farmers are the ultimate beneficiaries of comprehensive land consolidation [25], and social investors are an important force to promote comprehensive land consolidation projects. It has important theoretical and practical significance to construct a comprehensive land consolidation project decision-making evaluation index system from the perspective of farmers and social investors.

Based on the perspective of farmers and social investors, this paper constructs a comprehensive land consolidation project decision-making evaluation index system and evaluation method. We performed an empirical analysis by using the survey data of seven pilot projects of comprehensive land consolidation in Xianning, Hubei Province, in 2020 and the entropy weight TOPSIS method. It provides the theoretical basis and case support for standardizing the decision-making of the pilot project of comprehensive land consolidation and promoting the pilot work of comprehensive land consolidation.

#### **2. Materials and Methods**

#### *2.1. Study Area and Data Sources*

In April 2020, the Office of the Leading Group for Comprehensive Land Consolidation of Hubei Province issued the "Notice on Application for Comprehensive Land Consolidation Projects", requiring the province to carry out the application of comprehensive land consolidation projects. Xianning City, located in the Wuhan urban circle, organized the following 7 projects to apply for the 2020 Hubei Province Comprehensive Land Consolidation Pilot Project: Zhaoliqiao Town Project in Chibi City (Project A), Henggouqiao Town Project in Xian'an District (Project B), Xiangyanghu Town Project in Xian'an District (Project C), Dupu Town Project in Jiayu County (Project D), Daping Township Project in Tongcheng County (Project E), Tiancheng Town Project in Chongyang County (Project F), Honggang Town Project in Tongshan County (Project G) (see Appendix A: Figure A1 and Table A1). This paper takes 7 applied projects as examples to conduct empirical research (Figure 1).

**Figure 1.** Survey area.

In order to obtain empirical data, the research group of more than 10 people conducted a questionnaire survey on farmers and social investors (new business entities) in the above-mentioned 7 project areas in January 2022. After removing invalid questionnaires, a total of 306 valid farmers questionnaires were obtained, including 47 items A, 35 items B, 45 items C, 47 items D, 43 items E, 41 items F, and 48 items G; and 20 valid social investor questionnaires, including 3 items A, 2 items B, 2 items C, 4 items D, 3 items E, 3 items F, and 3 items G (The details see Appendix A: Tables A2 and A3).
