Coupling Coordination Between New Quality Productive Forces and Agricultural Economic Resilience Under a Three-Dimensional Spatial Framework: Spatio-Temporal Evolution, Spatial Agglomeration, and Configurational Pathways

Aligning with the global sustainability and sustainable development agenda, the synergistic development of new quality productive forces and agricultural economic resilience constitutes a core issue that is both theoretically pioneering and policy-urgent. This study examines the coupling coordination between new quality productive forces and agricultural economic resilience using Chinese provincial panel data (2014–2023) via coupling coordination degree, spatial autocorrelation, and fsQCA. Results show: (1) Coordination remains below 0.5, indicating a low-level equilibrium trap. (2) Spatial gradients persist: Eastern > Central > Western; grain-consuming > producing > balanced; southeast > northwest of the Hu Huanyong Line. (3) Spatial agglomeration reveals eastward hotspot consolidation and westward coldspot contraction, with the Hu Huanyong Line as a clear high–low divide. (4) QCA identifies one high-level pathway—endogenous synergy—and three low-level types: comprehensive scarcity, innovation ecosystem fragmentation, and network-organizational bottlenecks, none solvable by single-factor fixes. Contributions: It moves beyond unidirectional empowerment to a bidirectional coupling framework, integrates spatial and configurational methods to reveal equivalent causal pathways, and identifies a “triple overlap” of economic gradients, functional division, and geographic constraints that produces either cumulative advantages or disadvantages. These findings offer spatially explicit policy targeting for escaping low-level traps and achieving structural agricultural transitions, with relevance for developing economies facing dual productivity and systemic challenges.