Risk Governance of Centralized Farmers’ Residence Policy in Rural-Urban Integration: A Case Study of Shanghai L Town

Amid China’s rural–urban integration and rural revitalization, the Centralized Residence of Farmers Policy (CRFP) emerges as a pivotal tool to optimize rural spatial structure and land-use efficiency, yet its implementation risks—particularly risk coupling effects—remain underexplored. This study addresses this gap by constructing a holistic risk assessment framework and empirically examining CRFP in L Town, Shanghai; it employs a multi-method approach, integrating the Delphi method, Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP), and Cumulative Impact Model (CIM) to develop and validate a comprehensive risk assessment framework. This framework evaluates five key dimensions: policy content, implementation subjects, resource guarantees, target groups, and environmental adaptation. Empirical analysis of relocated farming households in L town reveals that the overall risk level of CRFP implementation falls within the moderate-risk range. Key identified risk factors identified include public opinion control, clarity of implementation standards, communication feedback accessibility, reliability of information resources, and effectiveness of implementation strategies. Based on these findings, the study proposes several risk mitigation strategies: aligning policies with local realities to promote high-quality social development, fostering collaborative digital governance through multi-stakeholder engagement, ensuring law-based policy formulation with transparent and supervised processes, enhancing public input through effective interest communication mechanisms, improving information dissemination with inclusive public participation, and adopting flexible implementation strategies. This research addresses fragmentation issues in the existing literature with a unified indicator system and provides actionable solutions that offer significant theoretical and practical value for advancing rural revitalization in the context of urban–rural integration.