Research On Intergovernmental Relations Of Wuhan Megalopolis

Due to the relative underdevelopment of political restructuring, intergovernmental relations have already evolved into the biggest obstacle impeding regional integration in China’s regional economic development. Since China’s Reform and Opening-up, intergovernmental competition for the legitimacy of regional economic and political achievements within Wuhan Megalopolis slowed down intergovernmental cooperation and shackled the formation of its agglomeration edge. The regional economic characteristics of its own further fomented drive for intergovernmental competition. So emerges phenomena like ill-coordination, industrial isomorphism, cut-throat competition, environmental pollution and growing income disparity. These constitute serious deviation from the objective of construction of resource-conserving and environment-friendly society.Focusing on the intergovernmental relations within Wuhan Megalopolis, and with a retrospect into theories related to regional economy and public administration, this paper analyzed the origin, influencing factors, connotation definition and subject scope of intergovernmental relations, built a bureaucracy pyramid model of China intergovernmental relations, clarified its major structure and manifestation pattern, and pointed out its future development trend. In terms of categorization, governmental relations in megalopolis are manifestation pattern of regional governmental relations. Through analysis of the connotation, genre, feature and manifestation of megalopolis governmental relations, this paper built a drive mechanism model of megalopolis governmental relations including four major drives. It also constructed theoretical model of megalopolis governmental relations with five major modules like subject, structure, content, drive, manifestation and effect, and too this model as the fundamental logical frame for the analysis of Wuhan Megalopolis governmental relations.Compared with those better-developed megalopolises, Wuhan megalopolis is relatively simple in intergovernmental relations as located only in one province, its administration is mainly characterized by equal and horizontal relationship between local governments. This helps the improvement of intergovernmental coordination and cooperation. However, its special mono-core structure in regional economy and fault in urban system intensified the urge for competition; smart-pig-game brings about a tendency of favoring passive wait to active implementation in cooperation strategy of other local governments, which forms a new challenge for the virtuous development of Wuhan Megalopolis relations in the local economy perspective.In general, research on Wuhan Megalopolis relations can be conducted from two dimensions:cooperation and competition. Formation and evolution of intergovernmental cooperation within Wuhan Megalopolis have undergone five stages, notable achievement is scored in integration and it is also effective in cooperation organization and mechanism. However, owing to a benefit mechanism with both cohesive force and dispersive force, together with its own regional economic structural feature, competition is still playing a leading role in the intergovernmental relations in Wuhan Megalopolis. Industrial isomorphism, vicious competition and free-rider problems are the manifestation and result into a vicious cycle. Meanwhile, the motive force for intergovernmental integration within the megalopolis shows only in the rudimentary establishment of the organization and mechanism, and is still inauthoritative. In terms of subjects in cooperation, there is also a severe lack of subordinate subjects in execution. All these factors together contribute to the formation of the dilemma model in intergovernmental relations in Wuhan Megalopolis that features competition, even vicious competition.Another Wuhan Megalopolis intergovernmental relations management model is built based on the dilemma model in this paper. The management model put forward two solutions:one is to adjust administrative divisions, another is to depend on market mechanism evolvement and stratification development from "1+8" to "1+4+4" and the corresponding stratified intergovernmental coordination organization and mechanism. Additionally, under the supervision, coordination and guidance of Hubei provincial government, with the establishment of reasonable profit compensation mechanism, networking and multi-element management approaches are discussed:organizational mechanism should be improved and perfected, encourage multi-party participation, build scientific performance appraisal system, conduct reform experiment on regional community integration and foster intergovernmental trust.