Unlocking carbon lock-in through multi-level governance: Configurational pathways for just transitions in...

Against the backdrop of the accelerating global net-zero agenda, resource-depleted cities face the dual pressures of decarbonization constraints and social stability risks. How to loosen high-carbon path dependence while achieving a just transition has thus become a core governance challenge for transition economies. Drawing on a heuristic framework that integrates innovation and transition theory, multi-level governance, and just-transition scholarship, this study examines 23 resource-depleted cities in China and employs dynamic QCA to identify configurational pathways toward just-transition outcomes. The results reveal pronounced equifinality among high-performance pathways, all of which share strong human-capital absorption, while low institutional rigidity appears in four of the five pathways, while governance steering, social buffering, and innovation-cultivation conditions exhibit substitutive and complementary relationships. In contrast, low-performance configurations are characterized by reinforced institutional lock-in, insufficient social buffering, and misalignment between innovation investment and local institutional or human-capital conditions. Further configurational comparisons reveal pronounced asymmetry in transition performance, with low performance not being a simple inversion of high performance. Based on these findings, the study proposes differentiated policy implications: external fiscal support should be prioritized toward institutionalized social-buffering mechanisms and human-capital accumulation; regulatory pressure should be coordinated with innovation cultivation to generate endogenous substitution dynamics; and transition failure can be mitigated by identifying and interrupting institutional-rigidity traps and innovation-misalignment traps. This study provides configurational evidence on how multi-level governance arrangements can loosen carbon lock-in in resource-depleted cities while advancing distributive and restorative just-transition outcomes.