What Drives Interlocal Cooperation in Economic Development? A Qualitative Comparative Analysis of Interlocal Industrial Parks in China’s Yangtze River Delta

AbstractRecent studies suggest that influence of contextual and cooperative arrangements on interlocal cooperation should be best understood as part of configurations. This study enriches this nascent perspective by developing a configurational theoretical framework and explores how contextual conditions (institutional proximity, geographic proximity, organizational proximity) and cooperative arrangements (goal interdependence, resource complementarity, collaborative structure) combine to influence interlocal cooperation in economic development. A fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis is used to analyze 34 interlocal industrial parks (IIPs) in the Yangtze River Delta of China. The results show two first-order equifinal configurations and six second-order configurations that lead to the success of IIP. The findings underscore that success conditions of interlocal cooperation in economic development work in configurations, not in isolation, and contribute meaningfully to debates pertaining to specific conditions.Keywords: Interlocal cooperationeconomic developmentfsQCAChinaSubject classification codes: H70H77R57L52 Authors contributionsConceptualization, C.L.; Formal Analysis, C.L., S.L.; Funding Acquisition, C.L., S.L.; Methodology, C.L., S.L.; Validation, S.L.; Writing—Original Draft, C.L.; Writing—Review and Editing, C.L., S.L.Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Data availability statementThe data underlying this article are available in the article and its supplementary material.Notes1 Due to the word limit, we put much of the research materials in the supplementary material. The following materials are included in the supplementary material: introduction to qualitative comparative analysis (QCA), overview of interlocal industrial parks, questionnaire development and questionnaire distribution, within-group agreement statistics, truth table for IIP performance, configurations sufficient for low IIP performance, and robustness tests. Supplementary material is available on the website of Public Performance & Management Review or can be requested from the authors by email.Additional informationFundingThis work has been founded by National Social Science Foundation Youth Project [Grant Number: 21CGL002].Notes on contributorsChunyou LiChunyou Li is an associate professor at Zhejiang Gongshang University Hangzhou College of Commerce, Hangzhou, China. His research interests include regional development, collaborative governance, industrial upgrading and others.Shuzhen LouShunzhen Lou is a lecturer in the School of Economics and Management at Zhejiang Sci-Tech University, Hangzhou, China. Her research interests include platform strategy, venture capital and others.