Change Agents and Interlocal Collaboration: An Agent Network Collaboration Model

• In Event: Networks and Collaboration

Abstract

The issues of fragmentation pose significant challenges to governance at the local level. Horizontal collective action problems present severe challenges to local governments as cities located in the same region find it difficult to achieve efficient policy or governance outcomes, when their decisions spill across the geographic boundaries (Feiock and Scholz 2010). One approach adopted by cities to mitigate horizontal fragmentation is by entering into interlocal agreement (ILA). While the formation of ILA has been widely studied in the literature, the important roles of change agents, especially public managers, have not been sufficiently addressed theoretically or empirically.

Drawing upon existing literature on administrator network (Feiock et al., 2012; Lee et al., 2012) and interlocal agreement (Andrew, 2009), we investigate how the network of city leaders affect the formation of interlocal agreement on environmental issues in Guangdong Province, China. In this study, we specially focus on the role of change agents, city leaders, and their networks in the process of interlocal collaboration. We propose an Agent Network Collaboration Model (ANCM) for interlocal agreement that brings individual agency back into the study of interlocal agreement. We hypothesize that the network of agents’ career paths (city leaders) connecting cities serves as channel facilitating the formation of interlocal agreement. Specifically, we hypothesize that two cities (X and Y) are more likely to establish more interlocal environmental agreements, when a city manager transferred from X to Y, and that the city manager is in office in Y during Yeart to Yeart+n (Direct Agent Network Hypothesis). We also hypothesize that two cities (X and Z) are more likely to establish more interlocal environmental agreements, when a city manager transferred from X to Y, then from Y to Z, and that the city manager is in office in Z during Yeart to Yeart+n (Indirect Agent Network Hypothesis).

The dependent variable for this study is the number of interlocal environmental agreements signed between any two cities in the Pearl River Delta. Accordingly, we employ a novel non-directed dyadic count model analysis at dyad-year level with an exhaustive combination of 14 municipalities over 7 years from 2009 to 2015. Every city is matched with the rest of the cities in the region to form a dyad. Our unit of analysis is dyad-year, therefore variables included in the model only consider the dyadic relationships between two cities, such as absolute differences in socio-economic variables. The dyadic panel data analysis was widely applied in the studies on international relations, such as international trade and civil war (Robst, Polachek, & Chang, 2007; Fuhrmann, 2009; Tir & Ackerman, 2009). We introduce these models to the study of interlocal collaboration, because they allow us to embed the dynamic leadership transfer network into a panel data structure, and then rigorously test the impacts of the administrator network through estimating the coefficients of the models. Specifically, we examine the impact of administrator network on the adoption of ILAs with dyadic panel Poisson model. Data are collected from China City Statistical Yearbook and manually coded media sources. Preliminary results support the effects of administrator network on the formation of interlocal agreement. The study presents novel theoretical framing of interlocal collaboration, along with new empirical methods for testing these hypotheses. This study has theoretical and practical implications for studies on interlocal agreement and collaborative governance.

Author

• Hongtao Yi, The Ohio State University