How governance boundaries affect regional collaboration on atmospheric governance—Evidence from China's Yangtze River Delta

Abstract

Regional public affairs will become more complex when contradictions emerge between administrative boundaries and policy issues that require cross-boundary collaboration. Breaking administrative boundaries has become a prerequisite for facilitating inter-local government collaboration. This study categorizes governance boundaries into the administrative boundary and the ecology-based policy boundary and then examines how these two governance boundaries and their interactive relationship contribute to the intergovernmental collaboration network in China's regional atmospheric governance (RAG). Using data on the atmospheric governance collaboration from 30 cities in the Yangtze River Delta region from 2013 to 2018, we employ the MR-QAP model to find that cities within the same administrative boundary are more likely to collaborate and cities within the ecology-based policy boundary, compared with those beyond, are more likely to collaborate but with a lagging effect. Ecology-based policy boundary has a positive but lagging moderating effect on the contribution of the administrative boundary to the formation of intergovernmental collaboration networks.