Spatial organization and coordinated development of offshore wind industrial chains under governance decentralization: evidence from China's coastal provinces

Offshore wind industrial chains, encompassing upstream component manufacturing, midstream project development and operation, and downstream grid integration, underpin large-scale utilization, yet their spatial organization, structural linkages, and coordinated development remain underexamined. This study examines offshore wind industrial chains in China's 11 coastal provinces during 2010 − 2023, a period characterized by globally leading capacity expansion and governance transition from national centralization to provincial decentralization, through a stepwise analytical framework integrating GIS-based spatial mapping, Entropy-TOPSIS evaluation, fixed-effects spatial Durbin modeling, coupling coordination degree assessment, and BCa-bootstrap fractional logit regression with event-window interactions. Results reveal that the spatial organization of major manufacturing and supply activities reflects their techno-economic characteristics and logistics requirements under decentralization-induced incentives, fostering province-embedded industrial development. Although cross-provincial spatial spillovers and competitive interactions are observed, segment performance remains primarily anchored in within-province adjacent-segment linkages. Provincial industrial chains exhibit distinct coordinated development patterns, with Jiangsu and Guangdong achieving high coupling − high development, Shandong, Liaoning, and Shanghai maintaining high coupling − low development, and late-entrant provinces gradually transitioning beyond low coupling − low development. These patterns are associated with provincial industrial foundations, economic capacity, and accumulated deployment experience, while governance decentralization tends to reinforce pre-existing industrial advantages in better-endowed provinces rather than facilitating cross-provincial convergence. The findings extend industrial organization theory by highlighting governance transition as a critical institutional context and provide practical insights for addressing China's industrial coordination bottlenecks, with broader applicability to emerging offshore wind markets with dispersed coastal resources, uneven port infrastructure, and fragmented manufacturing capacity.