China’s Interprovincial Agreements (IPAs) are formal arrangements (joint planning, joint policy initiatives, joint programs, contracts, etc.) in which one provincial government collaborates with another or in which multiple... [ view full abstract ]
China’s Interprovincial Agreements (IPAs) are formal arrangements (joint planning, joint policy initiatives, joint programs, contracts, etc.) in which one provincial government collaborates with another or in which multiple provinces pool their resources for joint problem solving, and better coordination. Rather than a top-down and hierarchical approach to governance, multiple provincial governments that are linked by their participation in multiple IPAs represent a bottom-up, horizontal and networked approach to collaborative governance at regional level. China’s provincial governments have increasingly participated in regional networks of IPAs, for the purpose of addressing policy problems that span the boundaries of individual geographic jurisdictions.
Our previous research on this topic shows that individual provinces vary in their level of participation in regional networks of IPAs. The purpose of this paper is to further address the research questions: What factors explain such variation of a province’s co-participation of IPAs with another province? Whether these factors vary across different policy areas of IPAs? Are similar or dissimilar provinces more likely to enter into IPAs together? On the basis of an extensive theoretical and empirical review, we propose that controlling relevant policy context variables, a province’s propensity to co-participate with another province in IPAs is a function of geography-based, attribute-based, and institutional and leadership-based homophily or heterophily. We also distinguish bilateral co-participation (BLC) versus multilateral co-participation (MLC) and examine if the impacts of these factors differ between BLC and MLC. The former refers to the IPA co-participation of bilateral agreements and the latter to that of multilateral agreements.
These questions will be studied with the dyadic relationship between pairs of provinces as the unit of analysis. China’s major regional collaborative networks include the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei Metropolitan Region, the Yangtze River Delta, the Pan Pearl River Delta and the Mid-China region. We will use the Pan Pearl River Delta (PPRD) as a case study of regional networks of interprovincial agreements. Also known as “9+2”, the PPRD is made up of nine mainland provinces of Fujian, Jiangxi, Hunan, Guangdong, Guangxi, Hainan, Sichuan, Guizhou, and Yunnan, and two special administrative regions of Hong Kong and Macau. The PPRD is unique in its horizontally organizing and voluntarily participating fashion. We will analyze a data set of 192 IPAs in seven policy fields, participated by nine provinces and two special administrative regions from 2003 to 2013.
We will apply a multiple regression quadratic assignment procedure (MRQAP) in social network analysis to our empirical investigation. Since eleven PPRD members are connected by their joint participation in 192 interprovincial agreements, they constitute seven two-mode networks for our analysis, one for each policy area. Each two-mode network data will be transferred to one one-mode network data—province to province. Eleven PPRD members will generate 55 reciprocal dyadic (province-to-province) relationships: 11*(11-1)/2 =55. We define the outcome of interest as the number of IPAs that any pair of provinces jointly participated, bilateral versus multilateral. The findings of this research will unpack the mechanisms that produce the patterns of collaborative relationships in China’s regional networks.
