Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

The issues of fragmentation pose significant challenges to environmental governance at the local level. Horizontal collective action problems present severe challenges to local governments as cities located in the same region find it difficult to achieve efficient policy or governance outcomes, when their decisions spill across the geographic boundaries (Feiock and Scholz 2010). One approach adopted by cities to mitigate horizontal fragmentation is by entering into interlocal agreement (ILA). While the formation of ILA has been widely studied in the U.S., it has not been sufficiently addressed in other national context, especially in Asia.

Environmental issues pose significant challenges to policy makers in China, in dealing with deteriorating air, water and waste pollution across local jurisdictions (Yi and Liu, 2015). While national and local policies have been adopted to protect the environment (Tang et al., 2016), local governments are still faced with a collective action dilemma where local authorities and policy designs are fragmented and insulated. In response to the ineffectiveness of fragmented environmental policies, local jurisdictions in China increasingly resort to collaborative approaches to solve regional environmental issues.

Drawing upon existing literature on administrator network (Feiock et al., 2012; Lee et al., 2012) and interlocal agreement (Andrew, 2009) in the U.S., we investigate how the network of city leaders affect the formation of interlocal agreement on environmental issues in Guangdong Province, China. In this study, we specially focus on the role of change agents, city leaders, and their networks in the process of interlocal collaboration. We propose an Agent Network Model (ANM) for interlocal agreement that brings individual agency back into the study of interlocal agreement. We hypothesize that the network of agents (city leaders) connecting cities serves as channel for interlocal agreement. Specifically, we hypothesize that two cities (a dyad) are likely to have more ILAs between them when they have higher agent connections in the city leader network.

With a dyadic panel data set of 14 cities in Guangdong Province, China from 2007 to 2015, we examine the impact of administrator network on the adoption of ILAs with dyadic panel Poisson model. The data are collected from China City Statistical Yearbook and manually coded media sources. Preliminary results support the effects of administrator network on the formation of interlocal agreement. The results of the study goes beyond the study context, and has implications for studies on interlocal agreement and collaborative governance in the U.S.