A Study Of Local Government Collaboration In Environmental Governance Across Administrative Regions

With the development of information and communication technology, transportation and modern society, numbers of wicked public affairs increase sharply. Various public issues have crossed administrative district boundaries. It is a great challenge for local governments which in existing administrative division to solve those wicked problems. We have seen the emergence of a class of problems whose causes are so complex, and whose solutions are so multi-factorial, that they require a multi-organization response. Collaboration between local governments aims to coordinate activities across administrative division. Therefore, the development of positive horizontal collaboration and interdependence becomes an important trend among local governments.The environmental pollution doesn't happen in administrative district, but regional area. However, there is a contradiction between the integrity of regional environment and fragmentation of environment management in practice. Environmental governance across administrative division is characterized by permeability, indivisibility, competition and externalities. The positive externalities of environmental protection and negative externalities of pollution lead to the lack of efficiency of regional environmental governance policies. The horizontal relation between local governments and environmental governance, for local interest, are fragmented. Collaboration is made difficult partly because the incentives to achieve each organization's aim are greater than the incentives to achieve more system-wide objectives. In summary, based on frequent cross-boundary pollution incidents, the rational interests of local government bring about irrational results that regional ecological environment has been deteriorated seriously.In the face of the growth of regional economic integration, it is necessary for local governments to take emphasis on collaborative partnership and to form an intergovernmental cooperative network on public affairs. This study attempt to explore the following questions:why horizontal local governments, which has no administrative subordination, need to cooperate with each other to protect regional environment; how to avoid the weak implementation of environmental policies, and invalid cooperation, to conduct effective communication and mutual concession between local governments. The study offers the hypothesis that regional environmental governance had become fragmentation that is preventing the achievement of important goals of environmental policy. Based on the framework of holistic governance, this study tries to extract a framework, which comprises four variables, to explain the action of local governments in environmental governance cross administrative division. Then the paper analyzes the history, practical problems and its reasons of collaboration between local governments, in order to test and verify the framework. The ultimate goal is to find out a general model of collaboration strategy between local governments for policy making and public management. The study takes qualitative approach through the methods of normative research, case study, documents analysis and comparative analysis.Firstly, the paper explains four theories, such as resource dependence theory, collective action theory, behavioral game theory and holistic governance theory, to provide theoretical guidance for the studies. Then the analysis framework, which comprises governance concept, organization structure, operation mechanism and the way of working, is constructed to provide the list of system variables that can explain the behaviors of local governments in collaboration.Secondly, from historical perspective, the brief history of collaboration policy in three typical regions is traced by institutional analysis. The influencing factors and logic elements of collaboration development will be summarized through the evolution of cooperative policy. After that, it's concluded that the existing collaboration between local governments is rooted in exogenous impetus.Thirdly, with coherence of analysis framework of holistic governance, the paper transforms Fragmented Authoritarianism Model. It presents the reality difficulties of collaboration between local governments from three perspectives that are value integration, resources and power allocation, policy making and implementation. Then the paper try to find out the underlying reasons for collaboration problems, from the view of governance concept, organization structure, operation mechanism, to open the blackbox of local government action.Finally, the paper compares three types of existed coordination mechanisms, which are market coordination mechanism, bureaucratic coordination mechanism and network governance coordination mechanism, and gives assessment of them. After demonstrating the feasibility of trends that local government collaboration towards holistic governance, the holistic strategy of collaboration, which contains collaborative philosophy, collaborative organization, collaborative mechanism and collaborative technology, is proposed at last. Moreover, according to the background of China's political system, the paper tries to find out a common holistic strategy model of collaboration between local governments in regional environmental governance.