“First Movers” Surpass, “Late Developers” Lag: How Far Away to the Integration of Jing-Jin-ji in China Based on Social Network Analysis?

Abstract

Given the context of Integration of Jing-Jin-Ji, the paper tries to introduce the theory of Institutional Collective Action (ICA) to empirically analyze the collaborative status among local governments based on 215 items of collected agreements (2013–2019) by the means of Social Network Analysis(SNA), especially to outline the collaborative network visually and expose Network Density, Centrality and Cohesion Subgroup etc. It is proved that holistic collaborative effects have been brought out by the integration of Jing-jin-ji, but there are great collaborative divergences in distinctive fields, such as the collaborative performances of ecology & environment and industrial economy are better than that of emergency management and public services. The imbalanced developments between First Movers and Late Developers are estimated to restrict the optimal integration of Jing-Jin-Ji. Due to the above flaws, the study suggests to update the collaborative pattern to comprehensively move a synergetic development in diversified fields by a resilient execution and promptly improve the collaborative governance in some late developing fields via the perfection of collaborative consciousness and monitoring mechanism.