Abstract:
In the past decades, there has been an increasing trend towards inter-city cooperation. The cooperative approach to provide public service and products between local governments has been deemed as an efficient policy option to deal with the challenges from globalisation, regionalisation, and the externalities resulting from urban entrepreneurialism. Specific to China, the city governments, which in this thesis, mainly refers to the prefecture-level and county-level governments, have also made lots of attempts to cooperate over their local economic development and public affairs. Nevertheless, in terms of cooperation the results of these initiations tend to vary to a great extent. Aside from the potential economic benefits, sociological institutionalism argues that a broad range of institutions, which include the formal rules, procedures, norms, moral templates, symbol systems and cognitive scripts provide “frames of meaning” and have structural influences on human action. Following this explanation, this thesis reviews regional pollution governance in the Xiaoqing River area, tourism cooperation initiatives at Weishan Lake and transport integration between Jinan and Laiwu. The findings demonstrate that China’s idiosyncratic institutional background has a significant impact on the shaping and the effectiveness of inter-city cooperation. Although the selfishness of city officials is not favourable to collective action or to forming cooperation in this thesis, there is an affirmative correlation between the legal frameworks, stimulating policies, leading groups, the provincial and city leaders’ values and concept related to cooperation, and the achievement of cooperation. The persistent and sticky “hierarchically administrative norm”, most especially, to a greater extent determines the model and as well as the effectiveness of inter-city cooperation.