The bulk of the literature on intergovernmental relations has been focusing on vertical intergovernmental relations involving the relations between national governments and subnational governments or provincial governments and subprovincial governments. Scant attention has been paid to horizontal intergovernmental relations, by which we mean the collaboration between local governments and the interactions between the government and quasi-government agents. Indeed, horizontal intergovernmental relations have been at the forefront of the debate around the globe in the field of public administration and management.
Horizontal intergovernmental relations are instrumental for a large country like China where socioeconomic and demographic distinctions of regions are beyond administrative boundaries; and such relations are beneficial for intergovernmental management and public governance wherein regional governments, without central supervision, collaborate with each other to enhance governance capacity, trust, and mutual policy benefits. In addition, intergovernmental managerial complexities require horizontal (and collaborative) intergovernmental relations to tackle common challenges at the local level. Therefore, the questions arise: How extensively do horizontal intergovernmental relations exist in China? How is collaboration employed to govern intergovernmental relations in China? How do Chinese institutional features enable or constrain horizontal (collaborative) intergovernmental relations at the local level? The volume tackles the following main topics: collaborative regional planning; horizontal financial transfers from rich regions to poor regions (for example, Guangdong Province to Xinjiang Province); collaboration between regions on public goods provision such as education, infrastructure, environmental protection; collaborative public management broadly, and more fundamentally governmental collaboration operated within and beyond the embedded administrative political-economic and institutional contexts.
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