Institutional configurational pathways and legal safeguards for value co-creation in mining area ecological restoration: A configurational analysis of legacy abandoned mining areas

How institutional arrangements enable value co-creation in the ecological restoration of legacy abandoned mining areas through multi-stakeholder participation remain systematically under-researched. Grounded in value co-creation theory and Williamson's institutional framework, this study develops an analytical model comprising cultural values, the institutional environment, and governance structures. It then applies fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fsQCA) to 32 typical restoration cases in China to investigate the configurational effects of institutional elements such as public environmental awareness, stringency of environmental regulation, clarity of property rights, technological support, green finance, and public fiscal support. The study reveals that high value co-creation emerges from multiple institutional pathways, including a cognition-driven pathway with financial-fiscal synergy, a cognition-driven pathway with regulatory reinforcement, a fiscal-led pathway with cognitive-technological synergy, a technology-led pathway with financial support, and a dual-driven pathway of technology and regulation, thus demonstrating significant equifinality and contextual adaptation. Across these pathways, Across these pathways, institutional elements function as core and peripheral conditions, exhibiting both complementarity and functional substitutability. Based on these findings, the paper proposes legal safeguards in three areas: strengthening public participation and environmental information disclosure systems; improving property rights definition and environmental regulation regimes; and building fiscal, financial, and technological support mechanisms, thereby providing implications for institutional refinement and policy practice.