China’s Regional Networked Governance: The Case of “9+2” Networks of Interlocal Agreements

China’s phenomenal economic performance has largely been attributed to a competitive environment in which local governments compete with each other to attract business investment, resources, and talent. Recently attention has turned to the efforts that involve collaboration among multiple jurisdictions at the regional level. Local governments increasingly confront policy problems that span the boundaries of individual geographic jurisdictions. The need to work together has clustered them into several large regional collaborative zones to address positive and negative interjurisdictional externalities caused by rapid social and economic growth. China’s major regional collaborative zones include the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei Metropolitan Region, the Yangtze River Delta, the Pan Pearl River Delta, and the Mid-China region (Ye 2009). Despite the fanfare of media coverage, how these regional collaborative zones work is still unknown. The purpose of this paper is to examine one type of regional collaborative mechanism—interlocal agreements (ILAs) from a network perspective. ILAs are formal and informal arrangements (joint planning, joint policy initiatives, joint programs, contracts, and others.) where one local government collaborates with another or in which multiple jurisdictions pool their resources for joint problem solving, better coordination, and diffusion of innovation. Scholars and researchers also recognize that multiple local governments that participated in multiple interlocal agreements became regional-level networked governance (Hu and Ma 2011; Thurmaier and Wood 2002). Regional networks of jurisdictions connected through multiple interlocal agreements are manifestations of regional collaborative governance.