From delineation to implementation of urban development boundaries: A two-stage game of land development rights

Urban development boundaries (UDBs) have been introduced in China’s territorial spatial planning system as a key tool to regulate urban expansion. However, existing research has paid limited attention to how land development rights are negotiated and exercised among multiple stakeholders under UDBs, from delineation to implementation. We develop a two-stage game model to explain the UDB policy, using the Pearl River Delta (PRD) urban agglomeration as a simulation case. In the first stage, a principal–agent model is applied to examine how land development rights are allocated through negotiations between superior and subordinate governments. In the second stage, an evolutionary game model is used to analyze the strategic interactions among governments and developers regarding land development rights under UDBs. Simulation results indicate that during delineation, higher land values and stronger bargaining capacity improve efforts to obtain quotas, whereas greater external volatility and heavier protection tasks reduce these efforts. During implementation, stakeholders’ strategies are linked with land quota scarcity in the first stage. In a quota-abundant scenario, the system converges to the optimal evolutionarily stable strategy (ESS) of strict supervision, prohibition, and compliance. In a quota-scarce scenario, achieving the optimal ESS becomes more difficult, requiring an effective penalty and strict accountability for subordinate governments. Overall, the proposed two-stage game framework provides a numerical illustration that captures the behavioral dynamics of multiple stakeholders and provides practical insights to strengthen the enforcement of UDBs.