Configurations for Urban Economic Resilience under the Green Transition: Dynamic QCA Evidence from Core Cities in the Yangtze River Delta

Amid increasingly stringent carbon reduction imperatives and the rising incidence of compound shocks, urban economic resilience has become a crucial benchmark for evaluating the effectiveness of green transformation and the capacity of cities to withstand and adapt to external disturbances. Using panel data for 27 central cities in the Yangtze River Delta from 2014 to 2023, this study develops a Technology–Organization–Environment (TOE) analytical framework and incorporates six key antecedent conditions, namely digital finance, green innovation, green finance, innovative human capital, green governance capacity, and green policy signals. On this basis, a dynamic qualitative comparative analysis (dynamic QCA) is employed to identify the multiple configurational pathways through which high urban economic resilience is achieved and to examine their intertemporal evolutionary patterns. The findings reveal that no single condition constitutes a stable and universally necessary prerequisite for high urban economic resilience across cities and periods. Instead, high resilience emerges from the joint effects of multiple factors operating in combination. Moreover, several equifinal configurations can lead to high resilience, while the relative explanatory power of different pathways shifts across stages of green transformation and exhibits a degree of convergence in the later sample period. By adopting a configurational perspective, this study enriches the understanding of how urban economic resilience is shaped under green transformation and provides empirical evidence for the design of differentiated and stage-specific policy mixes.