The rapid development of urbanization has led to a continuous migration of rural labor to cities, while also facilitating the widespread adoption of digital technologies in both urban and rural areas. The existing literature predominantly focuses on the negative impact of labor outflow on rural collective action, with insufficient research addressing how to mitigate these adverse effects. By using the social–ecological systems framework, and based on survey data from 131 villages across 14 cities in Guangxi, China, this study finds that digital technologies can alleviate the negative impact of labor outflow on irrigation collective action. The relationship between labor outflow, irrigation collective action, and the use of digital technologies is particularly evident in villages located in non-plain regions, those with distinctive cultural resources, high collective economic income, and restructured planning, and where technological advancements have been promoted. The findings of this study highlight a beneficial relationship between the phenomena of labor outflow and the diffusion of digital technologies, both of which are consequences of urbanization. This suggests that issues arising from urbanization can also be addressed and resolved through urbanization itself. The conclusions offer a new perspective for understanding the interactions between variables in social–ecological systems and provide a reference for developing countries to find suitable paths for combating rural decline and achieving sustainable rural development amidst rapid urbanization.

The conflict between individual rationality and collective rationality, as revealed by the tragedy of the commons, constitutes the core dilemma of collective action in ecological and environmental governance. The key to resolving this dilemma lies in systematically diagnosing the social–ecological system and identifying the crucial factors that hinder cooperation. However, existing diagnostic frameworks have largely focused on identifying the conditions for collective action formation. Thus, those frameworks establish a diagnostic logic centered on conditional principles, but they neglect the capture of the formation process of collective action. To address this gap, this paper further introduces a procedural principle centered on “squeeze-out → transformation → return” into the traditional diagnostic framework. This is achieved by constructing an integrated analytical framework that combines procedural and conditional principles. This study takes the ecological and environmental governance of the Dawangtan Reservoir in Nanning, Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, China, as a case study. The limitations of the traditional framework in diagnosing complex social–ecological systems are also examined. Further, this study demonstrates how the proposed integrated diagnostic framework enables problem identification and dilemma resolution by capturing the formation process of collective action. This research not only enriches the theoretical understanding of the formation process of collective action in complex contexts, but also helps practitioners more efficiently identify context-specific solutions to collective action problems.