Unveiling the resilience of the water-energy-food nexus: A context-specific framework and evolutionary insights for the Yellow River Basin

In the face of climate change, resource competition, and socioeconomic uncertainties, it is urgent to establish a theoretical framework for Water-Energy-Food nexus resilience (WEFNR) that is better adapted to regional characteristics and to conduct further analysis based on this foundation. Current research lacks adequate handling of complexity and context-specific adaptability. This study constructs a resilience framework for the Water-Energy-Food nexus (WEFN) in the Yellow River Basin (YRB) based on grounded theory (GT) and analyzes the processes, patterns, and driving mechanisms of WEFNR using the NPP-RF-PSO model and the Geodetector model. The study finds that (1) Water-energy-food nexus resilience (WEFNR) in the YRB comprises four dimensions: Resource Connectivity and Allocation Capacity (RCAC), Uncertainty Response and Adaptive Capacity (URAC), Institutional Effectiveness and Social Adaptability (IESA), and Sustainability of Ecological Infrastructure (SEI). (2) Compared with traditional TOPSIS and PP models, the ranking results of the NPP-RF-PSO model demonstrate a higher degree of innovation in ranking logic, with Kendall correlation coefficients as low as −0.0130 and −0.0311, respectively, and a superior ability in sample differentiation, as indicated by a high coefficient of variation (CV) of 7.5896 for the normalized scores. WEFNR in the YRB exhibits a trend of fluctuating growth over time, with a clear spatial gradient. (3) The primary driving factors have shifted from policy management to climate factors and agricultural technology innovation, with increasingly evident interactions between climate factors, policy management, and other factors. Accordingly, drawing on symbiosis theory, optimization strategies for WEFN resilience in the Yellow River Basin are proposed from the perspectives of symbiotic units, symbiotic relationships, and symbiotic environment, including enhancing the adaptability of resource systems, establishing cross-regional coordination mechanisms, and improving ecological compensation and market regulation mechanisms, providing new theoretical and practical references for resilience research in similar basins worldwide. • Applied a grounded theory approach to the field of resource governance, resulting in a context-specific Water-Energy-Food nexus resilience framework. • Integrated the advantages of various models to overcome the limitations of single-model approaches in addressing the complex, nonlinear relationships, offering new methodological support resilience analysis. • Proposed symbiotic enhancement strategies based on the evolutionary patterns of Water-Energy-Food nexus resilience in the Yellow River Basin.