Governance transitions in underground infrastructure: Coordinating resilience enhancement of ageing metro systems

As critical underground infrastructure, the resilience of ageing metro systems is fundamental to peoples’ safety and urban services. Its resilience failures extend far beyond technical origins; they arise from misaligned incentives, fragmented governance, and inefficient multi-stakeholder decision-making that derail technical implementation in complex urban settings. Here, we reconceptualize metro resilience as a socio-technical coordination problem rather than an exclusively technical one, developing a dynamic evolutionary game framework that reveals how service disruption constraints and stakeholder incentives determine whether cities escape low-resilience lock-in or achieve sustained adaptive capacity. We introduce a novel integration of life-cycle-informed, tripartite evolutionary game framework that integrates expert-based stakeholder salience identification with nonlinear dynamic modelling to capture long-term coordination in resilience enhancement decision-making. The results reveal that metro resilience is governed by sharp evolutionary tipping points: systems either remain trapped in low-resilience lock-in driven by short-term cost aversion or shift abruptly into stable high-resilience cooperation when institutional pressure, public supervision and risk reduction efficacy surpass critical thresholds. Beyond the ageing metro systems, this framework offers a transferable analytical lens for collaborative resilience decision-making in the comparable ageing urban underground infrastructures.