Skip to main content

ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Environ. Sci.
Sec. Social-Ecological Urban Systems
Volume 12 - 2024 | doi: 10.3389/fenvs.2024.1478864
This article is part of the Research Topic Territorial Governance as a Tool For Transformative Change View all articles

Structural Characteristics and Mechanism of Collaborative Environmental Governance Network of Urban Agglomerations: Perspective of Multilevel Network

Provisionally accepted
Yuting Zhang Yuting Zhang 1*Xiangwei Zhang Xiangwei Zhang 1Zhengnan Lu Zhengnan Lu 1Dongdan Zhu Dongdan Zhu 2
  • 1 Jiangsu University, Zhenjiang, Jiangsu Province, China
  • 2 Jingjiang College, Jiangsu University, Zhenjiang, Jiangsu Province, China

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    Collaborative environmental governance (CEG) is increasingly advocated to address the environmental risk issues in the integrated development of urban agglomerations. Constructing an effective CEG network from the perspective of interdependent multilevel network plays a vital role in promoting the environmental governance of urban agglomerations. To investigate the structure characteristics and formation mechanism of CEG network, this paper takes the Yangtze River Delta urban agglomeration as the research area, and employes the social network analysis and Exponential Random Graph Model (ERGM) methods to analyze the CEG network, which consists of the collaborative network of cities, relationship network of topics, and affiliation network connecting cities to topics.Research results show that the CEG level in the Yangtze River Delta urban agglomeration continues to improve, while the CEG network is still not in a tightly connected state. For the collaborative network of cities, it presents the small world characteristics and forms a cooperative trend of "central-subcentral-peripheral city."For the relationship network of topics, the evolution of environmental governance topics is characterized by "from aspect to point." For the affiliation network connecting cities to topics, as the diversity of environmental governance topics increases among cities, cities within the Yangtze River Delta urban agglomeration tend to share the similar topics. In addition, the interactive triangular structures, star structures, open triangular structures and closed triangular structures in the network can promote the formation of new cooperative relationships in CEG network.

    Keywords: collaborative environmental governance, Multilevel network, social network analysis, ERGM, Urban agglomeration

    Received: 11 Aug 2024; Accepted: 08 Nov 2024.

    Copyright: © 2024 Zhang, Zhang, Lu and Zhu. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: Yuting Zhang, Jiangsu University, Zhenjiang, 212013, Jiangsu Province, China

    Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.