Decentralized governance and collective action dilemma: Sub‐national governments' responses to COVID‐19 in China

While the Chinese government's responses to COVID-19 since its outbreak have been widely discussed, scant attention has been paid to the cross-regional variation in China in handling the pandemic in the early stage. This article adopts and synthesizes the theory of regionally decentralized governance and the institutional collective action dilemma framework to offer a novel analytical characterization of the pattern of sub-national governments' counter-COVID-19 initiatives in different policy areas and highlights the peer effect and regional competition dynamics. We provide three brief case studies to illustrate various institutional collective action dilemmas under this framework that emerged in pandemic responses and must be addressed through re-centralization. Despite its focus on China's regional responses to COVID-19, this paper prompts the construction of a broad analytical framework for precipitating a better understanding of the complex structure of China's political and governance system in a time of crisis.