Tourism-Driven Land Use Transitions and Rural Livelihood Resilience: A Spatial Production Approach to Sustainable Development in China’s Heritage Areas

Enhancing farmers’ livelihood resilience is a cornerstone of sustainable rural development and poverty alleviation consolidation in developing countries. While tourism has emerged as a prominent rural revitalization strategy, the mediating role of tourism-induced land use transitions in building resilience—and the underlying spatial mechanisms through which these transformations operate—remains inadequately understood. This study integrates Henri Lefebvre’s spatial production theory with land systems analysis to examine how tourism-driven land use transitions influence farmers’ livelihood resilience in rural China. Using provincial panel data and three waves (2018, 2020, 2022) of nationally representative household survey data from the China Family Panel Studies (CFPS), we construct a comprehensive tourism development index emphasizing land transformation dimensions and employ panel regression models with instrumental variables and threshold analysis. The findings reveal that tourism-induced land use transitions significantly enhance farmers’ livelihood resilience through three distinct spatial mechanisms: land-based rural infrastructure investment, industrial land structure rationalization, and cultural facility land development. Importantly, this relationship exhibits a double-threshold effect with diminishing marginal returns, and the positive impact is substantially stronger in heritage-rich regions with comparative policy advantages. By establishing land use transitions as a critical spatial production pathway linking tourism to sustainable livelihood outcomes, this study advances land systems science, offering a novel theoretical framework for integrating people–nature interactions in heritage-rich rural areas and practical guidance for strategic land use planning in support of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).