Governing the Green Transition: A Resource–Pressure Perspective on Urban Low-Carbon Sustainable Development in China

Amid the accelerating global green transition, urban Low-Carbon Sustainable Development (LCSD) has emerged as a critical governance challenge. Despite a growing body of research on low-carbon initiatives, the role of local governments in shaping urban LCSD outcomes remains inadequately explored. To address this gap, this study develops a resource–pressure analytical framework that systematically examines how local governments’ resource endowments and pressures jointly condition LCSD. Drawing on panel data from 262 Chinese cities spanning the period 2011–2021, we construct city-level composite indicators of LCSD performance and investigate the underlying driving mechanisms through a combination of statistical analyses and geographically and temporally weighted regression. Our findings yield three principal insights: (1) although overall LCSD has progressed steadily, inter-regional disparities have widened, characterized by persistent structural misalignments and a discernible shift in spatial clustering from the northeast toward southeastern coastal regions; (2) supervisory pressure and economic resources consistently emerge as the most robust and influential determinants of LCSD; and (3) both resource-based and pressure-based drivers display significant spatiotemporal heterogeneity: economic and technological resources exert particularly strong effects in the northwest and central-west regions, respectively, while policy pressures generate differentiated impacts across cities. This research contributes to the theoretical refinement of low-carbon governance frameworks and furnishes robust empirical evidence to inform context-sensitive and regionally differentiated policy design.