Evolution Of Regional Environmental Cooperative Governance Based On Social Network Analysis Perspective

In the past 10 years,in the face of China's increasingly prominent regional and basin environmental pollution with obvious spatial externality,local governments in the region often fall into the collective action dilemma of environmental governance;how to effectively solve such difficulties becomes a direction of academic research.The pattern of regional cooperation governance based on self-organization theory has found a new direction for the solution of the above-mentioned dilemma.It is different from voluntary individual behavior system in the market and the hierarchical system based on the bureaucratic order.The stakeholders for the common governance needs within a certain range spontaneously establish formal or informal relations to promote coordination and credibility so that they can set up the institutional collective action.In the early stages of regional cooperation governance,the major requirements are the collection of information and the establishment of trust;actors tend to choose loose coordination path to participate in the accord.As the cooperative governance advances,the main demands change into the supervision of betrayal of partners,as at this time more actors choose a coherent bunding road to participate in cooperation.From the perspective of social network,the regional cooperative governance model will form a cooperative network which can be observed,and it has significant structure characteristics.The above is an important starting point of this paper.This study is based on the theory of regional cooperative governance and uses the institutional collective action(ICA)analytical framework,social network analysis(SNA)and exponential random graph model(ERGM)as the main methods,to analyze environmental cooperation of 30 cities in the Yangtze River Delta's urban agglomeration from 2009 to 2015.From the dynamic network perspective,through analysis of the macro-level environmental cooperative governance statistical indicators of the overall network in Yangtze River Delta urban agglomeration,we make the initial detection of the overall network evolution trend.Furthermore,the evolution of the Yangtze River Delta crossregional environmental cooperation governance path at the micro level by identifying the characteristic of the network structure which has significant influence on managing the environment cooperation network.The results show that:(1)in the Yangtze River Delta urban agglomeration,the loose coordination path centered on the city with higher administrative level and gradually decreased with the promotion of the cooperative governance,but it is still an indispensable pattern in cooperative governance;(2)with the substantive environmental cooperation,the original coordination path cannot adapt to the more complex cooperation projects as more cities tend to set up a more stable cooperation mechanism,called reciprocity;(3)for the actual needs of the environmental governance of the cities,more of the strong and economically powerful cities or heavily polluted ones take the responsibility spontaneously in the small regional environmental cooperation as they act as initiators and coordinators.