Enhancing cotton industry chain resilience for agricultural security: a dynamic QCA approach

Purpose Against the backdrop of intensifying climate change, accelerating factor mobility, and continued agricultural transformation, the stable operation of the cotton industry chain faces multiple pressures, including production fluctuations, resource allocation constraints, market volatility, and external shocks. As an important economic crop and a major raw material for the textile industry, the resilience of the cotton industry chain is closely related to agricultural security, farmers' income stability, regional industrial upgrading, and the sustainable development of major producing areas. Methods Based on the Technology-Organization-Environment-Policy (TOE-P) analytical framework, this paper constructs a mechanism model of cotton industry chain resilience from five dimensions: digital empowerment, industrial structure, resource allocation efficiency, institutional environment, and policy regulation. It then applies the dynamic Panel-QCA method to panel data from 16 major cotton-producing and cotton-textile-producing provinces and regions in China from 2011 to 2023. Results First, no single antecedent condition constitutes a necessary condition for high cotton industry chain resilience, indicating that resilience improvement depends primarily on multi-condition synergy rather than isolated factor effects. Second, four high-resilience configurations are identified: the technology-industrial structure-policy effect-driven path, the four-dimensional synergistic superlinear path, the technology-institution-policy synergy-driven path, and the industrial structure-institution-policy synergy-driven path. Third, these pathways exhibit clear regional adaptation: the northwestern cotton-growing region is more compatible with the technology-institution-policy path, the Yellow River Basin cotton-yarn-producing region with the technology-industrial structure-policy path, and the middle and lower Yangtze River regions and coastal textile regions with the four-dimensional synergistic path. Conclusion Enhancing cotton industry chain resilience requires coordinated progress in digital empowerment, structural optimization, efficient resource allocation, institutional improvement, and policy coordination, as well as differentiated policy portfolios suited to regional endowments and industrial division of labor.