Digital Finance and Sustainable Urban Transformation: Socio-Technical Pathways to Green Technological Innovation

Green technological innovation (GTI) has moved from the margins of environmental policy to the centre of city-level industrial strategy in emerging economies, yet how it actually materialises across heterogeneous urban contexts remains poorly specified. Departing from the single-variable focus that dominates the existing literature, this study mobilises a socio-technical lens that treats GTI as an outcome of co-evolving technological, financial, regulatory, human-capital, and structural subsystems. Empirically, we draw on data from 283 Chinese prefecture-level cities and combine Necessary Condition Analysis (NCA) with fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fsQCA) to identify both the prerequisites for, and the equifinal pathways to, urban GTI. The NCA results indicate that no single antecedent reaches the conventional necessity benchmark, although financial technology (FinTech) approaches that threshold and exhibits the most stable bottleneck profile across rising GTI ambitions. Economic development and urbanisation, by contrast, dominate the bottleneck space once cities pursue mid-to-high GTI outcomes. The fsQCA solution returns two consistent recipes for high GTI—a Technology-Structure dual-driven configuration and a fuller Technology-Finance-Talent-Structure synergy—both anchored in the simultaneous presence of FinTech and economic maturity as core conditions. The mirror analysis for non-high GTI yields twelve distinct configurations that we organise into four prototypical failure modes: foundational deficits, compounded multi-factor scarcity, FinTech misalignment with industrial structure, and FinTech misalignment with environmental mandates. The asymmetry between success and failure pathways underscores that low GTI cities are not simply the inverse of high-performers but inhabit qualitatively different causal worlds. The findings carry direct relevance for Southeast Asian and other emerging-market cities navigating the joint imperatives of decarbonisation, digital finance diffusion, and industrial upgrading.