Assessing regional resilience in China using a sustainable livelihoods approach: Indicators, influencing factors, and the relationship with economic performance

•Sustainable livelihoods approach on vulnerability extended to resilience assessment.•SLA-based resilience assessment consistent with traditional resilience theory.•Resilience of China’s provinces increasing, but with regional heterogeneity.•Coordination between resilience and economic performance in China increasing.•SLA's five capital dimensions confer policy insights for resilience enhancement. Regional resilience analysis is crucial in the context of increased uncertainty. However, research into regional resilience lacks a unified framework. Thus, in this study, we propose a regional resilience evaluation method based on the widely used sustainable livelihood framework to analyze regional resilience and its relationship with economic growth in Chinese provinces during the period 2004–2018. Although regional resilience in Chinese provinces showed a gradual increase, the western regions are mostly low in resilience, whereas the eastern regions are generally high in resilience. The regional innovation level, green space per capita, industrial structure optimization, and fiscal expenditure ratio all have positive effects on regional resilience. In contrast, only the degree of openness has a negative effect on regional resilience. This methodology enables an integrated assessment of its role in influencing regional resilience in terms of broader natural dimensions, socio-economic dimensions. The degree of coordination between regional resilience and economic growth fluctuated but increased overall, and the linkage between them gradually emerged. The results of this relationship analysis, as well as comparisons with other indicator systems, suggest that the sustainable livelihoods approach is appropriate for regional resilience assessments.