Local water governance is challenging given the significance to public health and the difficulties to manage it in a fragmented administrative system. A collaboration network is a popular governance tool in local governance to cope with functional fragmentation problems and institutional collective action (ICA) dilemmas. Empirical works are needed to examine the outcomes of such governance networks, especially in the context of environmental governance. With fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA), this article seeks to evaluate the outcomes of collaboration networks by investigating the influence of network structures on local water governance performance in China. Based on empirical analyses on a dataset of twenty local water governance networks implementing the Water Ecological Civilization Pilot Project in China, the findings suggest that a high overall bridging and bonding of social capital and a low network density are important determinants of effective collaboration networks. This study has policy implications for the design of local collaboration networks in facilitating effective environmental governance.
In response to the increasing attention paid to environmental governance and leadership mobility, this study explores the interactions between leadership mobility and environmental governance performance. From the perspective of networks, this study aims to determine whether leadership mobility networks shape environmental governance outcomes. We argue that leadership transfer networks affect local water governance performance, which is particularly evident when leadership mobility occurs between cities with similar institutional environments. We collected managers’ career data and water governance performance from forty-one cities located in the Pan-Yangtze River Delta region in China from 2011 to 2015. Methodologically, we employ spatial temporal autoregressive models to test the hypotheses and confirm the effects of the leadership transfer network on the homogeneity of water governance performance across the region. Theoretically, this study advances the institutional collective action framework in regional water governance by providing supplementary mechanisms from the perspective of agent network diffusion.
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