Urban ecological resilience is essential for mitigating environmental risks, supporting green urban transitions, and promoting sustainable development. However, existing studies have mainly explained urban ecological resilience through linear and single-factor approaches, paying insufficient attention to the configurational mechanisms through which technological, financial, institutional, and structural conditions jointly shape resilience outcomes. Drawing on resilience theory, socio-ecological system theory, and synergetics, this study constructs a “risk identification–resource mobilization–institutional adaptation–structural carrying capacity” analytical framework. Using 249 prefecture-level cities in China as cases, we apply fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) to examine how six antecedent conditions—FinTech, green finance, environmental regulation intensity, economic development, industrial structure, and urbanization—combine to generate high and non-high urban ecological resilience. The antecedent conditions are measured in 2021, while urban ecological resilience is measured in 2023 to capture the lagged effects of resilience-building conditions. The results show that no single condition constitutes a necessary condition for high urban ecological resilience, indicating that resilience is shaped by multi-condition conjunctions rather than isolated determinants. The sufficiency analysis identifies two pathways leading to high urban ecological resilience. Both pathways share FinTech, economic development, and urbanization as common foundational conditions, while green finance and industrial structure play complementary roles under different urban contexts. Specifically, the first pathway reflects a “risk identification–resource mobilization–structural carrying capacity” mechanism, whereas the second pathway reflects a “risk identification–structural carrying capacity” mechanism. In contrast, five configurations lead to non-high urban ecological resilience, demonstrating clear causal asymmetry. Non-high resilience is mainly associated with the joint absence of technological feedback, resource mobilization, and spatial carrying capacity, rather than being a simple reversal of the high-resilience pathways. These findings suggest that urban ecological resilience should be promoted through differentiated, combination-based strategies tailored to cities’ technological, financial, institutional, and structural endowments.

Amid China’s pursuit of ecological civilization and high-quality development, a central policy challenge lies in designing environmental governance instruments that can simultaneously deliver ecological improvement and socially inclusive outcomes. Using the National Forest City (NFC) program as a representative urban ecological governance initiative, this study examines the relationship between place-based environmental certification and urban inclusive green growth (IGG) in China. Drawing on panel data from 290 prefecture-level cities over the 2000–2023 period, this study exploits the staggered rollout of the NFC program and estimates its relationship with urban inclusive green growth using a multi-period difference-in-differences framework. The results show that NFC designation is associated with a statistically significant increase in cities’ IGG performance, and this relationship remains robust across a series of alternative specifications and placebo tests. Dimension-specific estimates further show significant positive associations with economic performance, social equity, and environmental quality. Further analyses reveal pronounced heterogeneity in the estimated relationship. The positive association between NFC designation and inclusive green growth is stronger in non-resource-based cities, cities located in southern China, and core urban areas, suggesting that local development conditions and structural constraints play an important role in shaping the observed relationship. Employment-related analysis provides evidence consistent with broader city-level employment expansion as one potential pathway associated with the NFC–IGG relationship. Moreover, the positive association between NFC designation and IGG is stronger in cities with greater population mobility and where local governments place greater emphasis on innovation, underscoring the importance of complementary institutional and demographic conditions. By explicitly linking ecological governance, labor-market outcomes, and inclusive growth, this study contributes to the policy-oriented literature on urban sustainability. The findings suggest that environmental certification programs such as the NFC may provide a governance framework for connecting ecological objectives with inclusive development goals. Beyond the Chinese context, the results offer transferable insights for cities seeking to design environmental governance strategies that move beyond symbolic greening toward more integrated and socially inclusive sustainability transitions.