Work

Configurational Pathways for Enhancing Comprehensive Transportation Network Resilience in the Chengdu–Chongqing Region: Evidence from a fsQCA Approach

Year: 2026

Type: article

Abstract: Understanding how comprehensive transportation network resilience emerges from complex causal interactions is essential for developing adaptive and sustainable regional transportation systems. Addressing the inability of conventional regression approaches to capture configurational effects among multiple factors, this study applies fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) to identify pathways leading to high transportation network resilience in the Chengdu–Chongqing region. Using 209 city-year observations from 19 cities during 2014–2024, this study considers resilience as the outcome condition and incorporates ten antecedent conditions into the configurational framework. After direct calibration, necessity analysis, sufficiency analysis, and robustness tests are conducted. The results show that: (1) no single condition is necessary for achieving high resilience, confirming its configurational nature; (2) three equivalent pathways are identified: an economic foundation and digital infrastructure-supported pathway, an industrial–fiscal–governance collaborative low-risk pathway, and a fiscal–digital governance compensatory pathway under economic constraints. These pathways achieve an overall solution consistency of 0.9543 and coverage of 0.4223; (3) spatial structures significantly shape resilience outcomes, with the absence of high network dominance and low dual-core dependence consistently emerging as key conditions; (4) robustness tests confirm the stability of the configurations; and (5) differentiated strategies should be developed according to cities’ resource endowments and spatial constraints. This study advances resilience research by revealing configurational mechanisms and provides policy implications for transportation resilience governance in the Chengdu–Chongqing region and beyond.

Source: Systems

DOI: 10.3390/systems14111382

Authors: Jiayun Nie, Xiaohong Ren, Guowei Liu

Institution: Chongqing Jiaotong University

Language: English

Topic: Infrastructure Resilience and Vulnerability Analysis

Subfield: Civil and Structural Engineering

Field: Engineering

Domain: Physical Sciences

SDGs: Industry, innovation and infrastructure, Sustainable cities and communities

Open Access status: gold

Estimated APC paid: $2,896