A Running Start or a Clean Slate? How a History of Cooperation Affects the Ability of Cities to Cooperate on Environmental Governance
Abstract
:1. Introduction
2. Conceptual Framework
2.1. Autonomous Action in Environmental Governance
2.2. Joint Action in Environmental Governance
2.3. The Effectiveness of Cooperation on Environmental Governance
3. Methods, Case Areas, and Data
3.1. Event Sequence Analysis
3.2. The Case Areas
3.3. Data Collection and Coding
3.4. Data Analysis
4. Empirical Findings
4.1. The Event Graph of Environmental Governance Trajectory in BTH
4.2. The Event Graph of Environmental Governance Trajectory in YRD
4.3. The Participation of Actors in Bringing about Joint Actions
4.4. The Outcomes of Cooperation on Environmental Governance in BTH and YRD
5. Conclusions
Supplementary Materials
Author Contributions
Funding
Acknowledgments
Conflicts of Interest
References
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Action Category | Action Type | Description |
---|---|---|
Autonomous actions | Legislative and policy actions (LPA) | Establishment, adaptation or termination of legal prescriptions (including laws, regulations, policies, plans, directives, and formal procedures. |
Monitoring and enforcement actions (MEA) | Carrying out environmental inspections and carrying out sanctions when the inspected entity breaks environmental regulations. | |
Political actions (PA) | Political leaders personally carry out surveys or inspections, or political leaders make political statements to incentivize environmental protection. | |
Joint actions | Formal joint actions (FJA) | The establishment of formal inter-local frameworks and agreements, the establishment of supra-local organizations, associations and/or coalitions, the development of joint projects, plans and programs, and the establishment of information-sharing channels and common goals and visions. |
Informal joint actions (IJA) | Meetings among major local leaders, and informal oral agreements. |
Propositions | Indicative Patterns | Analytical Tools | Descriptors |
---|---|---|---|
Proposition 1. | Where city-level governance activities follow joint actions, they tend to follow more often from formal joint actions than informal joint actions. | Event Graph | Qualitative description of an event; Directed edges between events. Out-degree of a node: the number of later events, to which an event is related (i.e., a node). |
Proposition 2. | Where city level governance activities follow joint actions, they tend to follow more often from informal joint actions than formal joint actions. | ||
Proposition 3. | Joint actions are brought about primarily by supra-local actors. | Two-mode actor-event networks | Attribute of an actor; Edges between actors and joint actions; Betweenness centrality: a node with higher betweenness centrality would have more control over the network, because more information will pass through that node. |
Proposition 4. | Joint actions are brought about primarily by local actors. | ||
Proposition 5. | Cooperation in a historical context of no prior cooperation leads to intertwinement of goals of involved actors and reduced or compensated the costs and negative side-effects. | Qualitative assessment | Qualitative description of an event; Directed edges between events. |
Proposition 6. | Cooperation in a historical context of prior cooperation leads to intertwinement of goals of involved actors and reduced or compensated the costs and negative side-effects. |
UA | Type of Joint Action (Absolute Amount) | % | Total Number of Following Autonomous Actions | Top 5 Outdegree Joint Actions * | Quantity of Following Autonomous Actions |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
BTH | FJA (30) | 75.0% | 13 | R1 | 3 |
R3 | 2 | ||||
R7 | 1 | ||||
R15 | 1 | ||||
R16 | 1 | ||||
R17 | 1 | ||||
R19 | 1 | ||||
R22 | 1 | ||||
R29 | 1 | ||||
R36 | 1 | ||||
IJA (10) | 25.0% | 13 | R10 | 5 | |
R23 | 5 | ||||
R13 | 3 | ||||
YRD | FJA (7) | 14.3% | 4 | Y39 | 4 |
IJA (42) | 85.7% | 122 | Y27 | 14 | |
Y17 | 12 | ||||
Y26 | 12 | ||||
Y25 | 11 | ||||
Y32 | 11 |
UA | Actor | Betweenness Centrality | No. Joint Actions in Which Actor Participates |
---|---|---|---|
BTH | MOEP | 21.583 | 12 |
BEPA | 6.477 | 15 | |
TEPA | 6.477 | 13 | |
HEPA | 6.477 | 13 | |
BG | 5.009 | 15 | |
TG | 5.009 | 14 | |
HP | 5.009 | 14 | |
NDRC | 1.511 | 6 | |
MOIIT | 1.511 | 6 | |
MOF | 1.511 | 5 | |
YRD | SH mayor | 31.763 | 34 |
JS CPC secretary | 0.811 | 14 | |
ZJ CPC secretary | 0.811 | 14 | |
SH CPC secretary | 0.811 | 14 | |
AH CPC secretary | 0.811 | 15 | |
JS governor | 0.811 | 16 | |
ZJ governor | 0.595 | 17 | |
AH governor | 0.595 | 15 | |
ZJDRC director | 0.017 | 8 | |
SHDRC director | 0.017 | 8 |
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Mu, R.; Spekkink, W. A Running Start or a Clean Slate? How a History of Cooperation Affects the Ability of Cities to Cooperate on Environmental Governance. Sustainability 2018, 10, 1950. https://doi.org/10.3390/su10061950
Mu R, Spekkink W. A Running Start or a Clean Slate? How a History of Cooperation Affects the Ability of Cities to Cooperate on Environmental Governance. Sustainability. 2018; 10(6):1950. https://doi.org/10.3390/su10061950
Chicago/Turabian StyleMu, Rui, and Wouter Spekkink. 2018. "A Running Start or a Clean Slate? How a History of Cooperation Affects the Ability of Cities to Cooperate on Environmental Governance" Sustainability 10, no. 6: 1950. https://doi.org/10.3390/su10061950