Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Significant environmental challenges have accompanied China’s rapid economic development. Fragmentation issues and policy spillovers across jurisdictions force local governments increasingly to seek inter-local collaborations for environmental protection. In authoritarian regime of China, the inter-local collaboration can be characterized as ‘hierarchical collaboration’ – local governments’ associate voluntarily, but their collaboration is influenced by not only bottom-up factors as past experience, but more importantly, also by top-down intervention as formal policy requirements. Multiple collaborations are initiated due to top-down factors of the superior policy requirement, while sometimes governments form bottom-up networks voluntarily. Due to the difference of initiation process, participants’ credible commitments and collaboration risks vary from case to case. However, the theoretical study of environmental collaboration in China has lagged behind practice. Especially, less has been discussed about the different network configurations of top-down and bottom-up networks in China.

Scholars have stated coordination, division and defection problems make collaboration risky, and thus actors might choose to interact with each other strategically. According to the “risk hypothesis”: policy actors seek bridging relationships when facing low risks to gain non-overlapping information or resources, but seek bonding relationships when risks increase and to guarantee credible commitments. In China, the initiation process largely determines the potential risks and partners’ commitments. Specifically, when imposed by superior government, the formal policy requirement usually clearly defines the rules, responsibilities and the membership tends to be obligatory. In the top-down network, local actors might face low collaboration risks, and the superior authority could serve as the safeguard for participants’ collaborative commitments. However, when initiated by local governments, because of the intense regional competition, participants are easy to generate conflicts of the distribution of benefits and costs, causing distrust and high collaboration risks. Therefore, local governments tend to give priority to different interaction strategies within different types of networks. Our research tries to explore the question: How do actors make decision to participate in collaborative activities that shape different network configurations in top-down and bottom-up networks for environmental protection?

Previous studies mainly adopted the one-mode network analysis, but some scholars stated that one-mode projections might have some limitations, such as information loss, misleading results and others. The relationships of participants are not only decided by the local governments’ connections, but also the collaborative action they are involved. Thus, our paper is trying to contribute existing literature by employing the two-mode or bipartite network that contains both actor level attributes and action level attributes. Based on the two-mode collaboration data collected from Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei, Yangtze River Delta, Pearl River Delta and Cheng-Yu areas in China from 2008 to 2019, this paper begins to investigate the different network configurations in top-down and bottom-up networks. Our research found that multiple governments might participate into the same collaborative action within top-down network, indicating the weak bonding strategy. Whereas, in terms of bottom-up networks, strong bonding configurations of city-based and action-based are salient, for guaranteeing actors’ collaborative efforts and commitments.