Institutional configurations and conservation agriculture outcomes: A fuzzy-set analysis of production units in Lishu County, China's black-soil region

Conservation agriculture in China's black-soil region is delivered through service-providing production units operating under shared county policy frameworks, yet implementation outcomes vary substantially across units. This study asks which configurations of governance conditions are associated with high sustainability performance. Using fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis on 26 production units in Lishu County, Jilin Province, we examine four conditions, standard implementation intensity, service-chain coordination, outsourcing, and financial support, against a composite sustainability outcome combining soil protection, grain yield, yield stability, and spillover effects (Cronbach's alpha = 0.76). No single condition approaches necessity for high performance. The baseline solution identifies a high-coverage coordination pathway and a finance-conditioned outsourcing route; under stricter frequency thresholds the solution simplifies to coordination alone, a pathway stable across 100% of threshold-grid specifications and 96% of leave-one-out runs. The analysis identifies a conditional complementarity between outsourcing and financial capacity that generic complementarity theory does not predict for sub-national agricultural governance. We frame the findings as a provisional governance reference point for institutionally and biophysically comparable settings, with policy implications for shifting county instruments from area-based expansion metrics to governance-quality gates.