Cooperation Willingness Of Local Governments In Wuhan Metropolitan Area And Its Influencing Factors

Economic globalization,regional integration and regional public problems have forced local governments to break through the traditional administrative boundaries and carry out extensive intergovernmental cooperation to solve public and external social problems.Many domestic integrated regions and urban agglomerations have been established one after another,such as the Pearl River Delta,Yangtze River Delta,Beijing Tianjin Hebei and Chengdu Chongqing urban agglomerations,and have achieved remarkable results.The cooperation network based on equal consultation and voluntary choice is playing a more and more important role in regional governance.The local government,as the main body of action with administrative resources and political authority,plays the role of participant and promoter in regional cooperative governance.In order to deal with the increasingly complex public problems and improve the ability to provide public goods and services,local governments voluntarily sign cooperation agreements based on the consideration of maximizing the benefits and costs,and build a regional cooperation network governance structure.Through the analysis of the nature and function of this network structure,and from the "relationship"level to investigate the micro mechanism of local government cooperation,we can better understand the behavior choice and cooperation willingness of local government in the process of cooperation and the factors influencing this willingness.Firstly,this paper summarizes the foreign scholars’ theoretical and empirical research on local government cooperation from four dimensions:the reason,process and mechanism,Dilemma and the construction of cooperation relationship;This paper summarizes the relevant research of domestic scholars from four dimensions of cooperation theory,path and mechanism,Dilemma and network analysis of cooperation agreement.On this basis,it explains the basic concepts of regional governance and intergovernmental cooperation,intergovernmental agreement and agreement network,and constructs the analysis framework of this paper based on social network theory and public choice theory.Secondly,this paper makes a detailed analysis of the intergovernmental cooperation behavior of the nine municipal governments in Wuhan metropolitan area in 2007-2019 by using the institutional tool of intergovernmental cooperation agreement to promote the construction of "two oriented society" The scale and autonomy of participants explore the characteristics of cooperation agreement signing and government participation.On this basis,using the social network analysis method,from the two dimensions of "actor" and"relationship",this paper analyzes the structure and characteristics of the intergovernmental cooperation network in the three fields of economy,industry,science,education,culture and infrastructure through the network density,centrality and agglomerative subgroups of cooperation agreement.Finally,the paper quantifies the economic strength,government capacity,population factors,political system and geographical distance indicators of the nine municipal governments in the region,constructs the difference matrix of different variable indicators between the two cities,and conducts QAP correlation analysis and regression test with the cooperation agreement matrix in the fields of economic industry,science,education,culture and infrastructure,To observe the specific factors that affect the willingness of local governments to cooperate.The results show that:from 2007 to 2019,the nine municipal governments in Wuhan metropolitan area make full use of intergovernmental cooperation agreements to build cross regional and cross field cooperation relations and form a crisscross network of cooperation agreements,which are characterized by universality,development and flexibility;As far as participants are concerned,the whole region has formed the characteristics of Wuhan’s dominance,one strong and many weak,and the convergence of urban positioning.At the same time,in different policy areas,the content,scale and autonomy of intergovernmental cooperation agreements are different:in the three major areas of economic industry,science,education,culture and health and infrastructure construction,there are three governance models:shared network governance,Leadership Network Governance and external administrative network governance.The urban structure of Wuhan metropolitan area has distinct regional characteristics.The regional integration development is mainly promoted by external administrative forces and started late.It is different from the Yangtze River Delta,Pearl River Delta and other regions which are market-oriented and spontaneous cooperation.At the same time,the regional members do not cross provinces.To improve the level of inter governmental cooperation in the region,efforts should be made in many aspects,such as clarifying the positioning of cities in the region,improving the functions of sub central cities,improving the construction of relevant systems and mechanisms,and strengthening inter governmental self coordination.