Urban ecological resilience is essential for mitigating environmental risks, supporting green urban transitions, and promoting sustainable development. However, existing studies have mainly explained urban ecological resilience through linear and single-factor approaches, paying insufficient attention to the configurational mechanisms through which technological, financial, institutional, and structural conditions jointly shape resilience outcomes. Drawing on resilience theory, socio-ecological system theory, and synergetics, this study constructs a “risk identification–resource mobilization–institutional adaptation–structural carrying capacity” analytical framework. Using 249 prefecture-level cities in China as cases, we apply fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) to examine how six antecedent conditions—FinTech, green finance, environmental regulation intensity, economic development, industrial structure, and urbanization—combine to generate high and non-high urban ecological resilience. The antecedent conditions are measured in 2021, while urban ecological resilience is measured in 2023 to capture the lagged effects of resilience-building conditions. The results show that no single condition constitutes a necessary condition for high urban ecological resilience, indicating that resilience is shaped by multi-condition conjunctions rather than isolated determinants. The sufficiency analysis identifies two pathways leading to high urban ecological resilience. Both pathways share FinTech, economic development, and urbanization as common foundational conditions, while green finance and industrial structure play complementary roles under different urban contexts. Specifically, the first pathway reflects a “risk identification–resource mobilization–structural carrying capacity” mechanism, whereas the second pathway reflects a “risk identification–structural carrying capacity” mechanism. In contrast, five configurations lead to non-high urban ecological resilience, demonstrating clear causal asymmetry. Non-high resilience is mainly associated with the joint absence of technological feedback, resource mobilization, and spatial carrying capacity, rather than being a simple reversal of the high-resilience pathways. These findings suggest that urban ecological resilience should be promoted through differentiated, combination-based strategies tailored to cities’ technological, financial, institutional, and structural endowments.
Chen et al. (Tue,) studied this question.