Resilience Assessment and Governance Strategies for a Complex Watershed System: A Case Study of the Erhai Basin, China

Ecological resilience serves as a critical foundation for regional ecological management. As a fundamental unit of ecological governance, a watershed integrates natural, economic, and social subsystems into a complex composite system. However, the mechanisms linking human activities, management behaviors, and natural processes to ecological resilience at the watershed scale remain poorly understood. To address this gap, this study takes China’s Erhai watershed as a representative case and develops an integrated evaluation framework for assessing the resilience of a watershed-scale natural–economic–social composite system. The framework combines resilience measurement, coupling coordination analysis, and scenario simulation using the Ordered Weighted Averaging (OWA) method. The results indicate that the overall resilience of the Erhai watershed increased steadily from 2005 to 2020, with the average value rising from 0.23 to 0.42. However, spatial disparities in resilience widened, reflecting challenges of uncoordinated regional development. Fiscal revenue was identified as a key driver of resilience enhancement, as higher fiscal capacity promotes greater investment in ecological protection and environmental governance. Scenario simulations further revealed that the conservation-priority policy scenario achieved the highest resilience, characterized by stronger infrastructure development, improved environmental management, and increased investment in social security and health, supported by sustainable tourism. These findings provide theoretical and practical insights for promoting coordinated and resilient watershed governance in China and similar regions worldwide.