Unpacking the causal complexity of collaborative effectiveness in urban marginalized community regeneration: a fuzzy-set configurational analysis

This study examines the causal conditions shaping collaborative effectiveness in the regeneration of marginalized urban communities. Using fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis of 22 Chinese cases, it identifies facilitative leadership as a necessary condition for achieving high collaborative effectiveness and weak institutionalization as a necessary condition for low effectiveness. The sufficiency analysis reveals three distinct pathways to effective collaboration and three to ineffective collaboration. The findings show that collaborative effectiveness depends on context-specific configurations of resource support, institutionalization, governance structure, and facilitative leadership. No single condition is sufficient in isolation; rather, effectiveness emerges through complementarity, functional equivalence, and asymmetric substitutability among conditions. The study contributes to a more context-sensitive and configurational understanding of collaborative governance.