Against the backdrop of the ten-year fishing ban in the Yangtze River Basin, guiding retired fishermen to participate in ecotourism is critical for community livelihood reconstruction. However, existing research often overlooks the psychological mechanisms translating objective resource endowments into actual behavioral intentions. Adopting a strictly positivist and purely quantitative empirical paradigm, this study constructs an Extended Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB) model that integrates sustainable livelihood capital, policy and social network support, and benefit perception. Based on cross-sectional survey data collected from 600 retired fishermen in the Poyang Lake region, Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM) was utilized to test the proposed hypotheses. The results indicate that the structural model explains 25.6% of the variance in ecotourism participation intention (R2 =0.256). Crucially, perceived behavioral control (?=0.385) emerges as the strongest predictor, followed by subjective norm (?=0.170) and attitude (?=0.141), highlighting a prevailing "survival rationality" among marginalized communities facing coerced occupational transitions. Furthermore, the antecedent path analysis confirms that sustainable livelihood capital robustly enhances fishermen's perceived behavioral control (?=0.534), while policy and social network support significantly reinforces subjective norms (?=0.465), and economic and ecological benefit perception positively shapes attitudes (?=0.515). This study theoretically unlocks the psychological black box, elucidating how objective capital is internalized to form subjective intentions, thereby expanding the applicability of the TPB framework in ecologically fragile zones. Practically, the findings offer robust empirical evidence urging local governments to pivot their transitional policies from generic ideological mobilization toward precise capital empowerment and targeted skill-building interventions.
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