Audit-Informed Digital Pathways to Rural Ecological Revitalization: A Configurational Governance Framework Applied to 30 Provincial-Level Regions in China (2018–2022)

Rural regions worldwide face intensifying environmental pressures under the global sustainability transition, yet the digital conditions associated with high levels of rural ecological revitalization (RER) remain insufficiently understood. Existing studies largely examine digital development through aggregate indicators or average relationships, leaving the distinct structural roles of heterogeneous digital capabilities and their implications for environmental audit governance underdeveloped. We develop an audit-informed configurational governance framework to examine how combinations of digital conditions relate to high levels of rural ecological revitalization, which is measured using an entropy-weighted composite index. Using 150 province–year observations from 30 provincial-level regions in China during 2018–2022, we combine necessary condition analysis (NCA) and fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) and compare aggregate capacity with scale-adjusted operationalizations. Three empirical findings and one applied governance implication emerge. First, under the aggregate capacity operationalization, hardware facilities and the application environment exhibit the strongest convergent necessity-in-degree evidence across the NCA ceiling techniques, whereas no individual condition retains a substantive necessary condition effect under the scale-adjusted operationalization. Second, the aggregate capacity fsQCA analysis yields 75 equally minimal intermediate models, with the conjunction of high hardware facilities, non-high industrial digitization, and a high application environment (A*~D*E) appearing in all 75 models as the sole model-invariant term. Third, this high-RER configurational structure does not extend to the scale-adjusted operationalizations, indicating a measurement boundary between overall provincial capacity and relative resource and service intensity. From an audit-informed perspective, these findings suggest that sustainability governance should assess not only resource-stock adequacy but also operational functionality, service accessibility, utilization, and conversion performance. Together, the findings support a configurational capability-alignment perspective, highlight the importance of distinguishing aggregate capacity from scale-adjusted intensity, and provide governance-relevant evidence for advancing infrastructure development, sustainable communities, and terrestrial ecosystem protection in line with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), particularly Goals 9, 11, and 15.