Understanding interlocal collaboration for service delivery for migrant workers during the COVID-19 pandemic: evidence from Guangdong, China

ABSTRACT

Interlocal collaboration for service delivery (ICSD) for migrant workers has grown rapidly in the postpandemic era. Nevertheless, limited research has investigated the mechanisms through which localities interact with one another in the implementation process. This study explores under what conditions a city collaborates more with one city than another in ICSD for migrant workers in Guangdong Province, China. Our results show that geographical proximity, workforce similarity, and administrative status asymmetry are positively related to partner selection. City mayors’ personal connections are associated with a higher collaboration degree. However, problem severity has negative impacts on both partner selection and collaboration degree.

KEYWORDS:

• Interlocal collaboration
• migrant workers
• transaction costs
• directed dyadic analysis

Acknowledgement

The earlier version of this paper was presented at several academic conferences or symposiums including “The 10^th Sino-U.S. International Conference on Public Administration (2021)”, “25^th International Public Management Network (IPMN) Annual Conference (2021)” and “Redefining Public Administration: New Paradigms for the Post Pandemic Era (2021)”. The authors would like to thank Allan Rosenbaum, Jae Moon, Tom Christensen, Hanyu Xiao and other participants for developmental comments. The correspondence of the paper should go to Ziteng Fan.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supplemental data

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed at https://doi.org/10.1080/14719037.2022.2116095

Notes

1. National Bureau of Statistics. Main Data of the Seventh National Population Census. [EB/OL]. (2021-05-11). http://www.stats.gov.cn/english/PressRelease/202105/t20210510_1817185.html.

2. Before 2020, a few ICSD practices existed in certain regions, such as the Yangtze River Delta region. However, it was not until the second half of 2020 that ICSD reform was officially recognized by the central government and was supported to diffuse at local levels.

3. The same holds for migrant worker B who works in city-h but originates from city-w. That is, migrant worker B can directly access administrative services offered by working city-h and does not need to return to hometown city-w to make service requests after the ICSD between city-h and city-w.

4. People’s Government of Guangdong Province. Main Data of Guangdong province of the Seventh National Population Census. [EB/OL]. (2021-11-16). http://www.gd.gov.cn/gdywdt/dsdt/content/post_3284100.html.

5. Although vice-provincial cities have a higher administrative rank than prefecture cities, this does not mean that prefecture cities are subordinates of vice-provincial cities.

6. This study focuses on the personal connections of city mayors because in China’s administrative arrangements, government leaders (e.g. governors and mayors) are mainly responsible for the reforms of administrative service delivery. This is especially the case in Guangdong Province. The mayor of each city serves as the leader of administrative service reforms and coordinates relevant cross-boundary issues.

7. Extant interlocal collaboration studies employ either a subjective or objective approach to capture problem severity. This study follows the objective approach, which usually relies on the amounts of target populations (Kalesnikaite and Neshkova 2021; Warner, Aldag, and Kim 2020). The underlying rationale is that a population that can be affected by a policy usually has a louder voice to express its needs and concerns regarding this policy. This will make governments conscious of the potential policy problems. In this study, migrant workers constitute the target population of ICSD reforms. First, addressing the service needs of migrant populations constitutes the major goal of ICSD and frequently appears in policy documents. For example, the policy guideline issued by the central state in 2020 mentions that the guiding principles of ICSD implementation involve balancing COVID-19 prevention/control policies and socioeconomic development, more efficiently serving the migrant populations and promoting the circular flow of the factors of production. Second, further interviews with government officials who are responsible for ICSD also validate our approach. For example, interviewee No.13 mentioned that “when searching potential partners to collaborate with … we can look at the number of service requests from back-offices and make some data analyses. We specifically pay attention to the amounts of population flow between two cities and the needs of these migrant workers. We may reach out to cities with large amounts of populations working in our city and ask these cities’ willingness of collaboration” (No. 2,021,121,302). Due to space limitations, please see the Appendix for more interview details.

8. Although we acknowledge that it would have been better if we could explore ICSD in the cities in Chinese provinces, Guangdong is the only province that discloses data regarding the number of interlocal sharing services among all cities within its jurisdiction and can offer good quality data to support empirical explorations. Furthermore, Guangdong is a typical case of implementing ICSD for migrant workers in China as it has large flows of intercity migrants. Finally, many existing studies also focus on interlocal collaboration among localities in a certain region. For example, Song, Park, and Jung (2018) used a sample of 25 local governments in the metropolitan city of Seoul to test the role of political similarity in facilitating interlocal cooperation. Shrestha and Feiock (2011) focused on interlocal contracts among all 25 local governments in Pinellas County, Florida.

9. The model fit indicators also imply that ZINB is suitable. The significant alpha in the diagnostic tests suggests that overdispersion is a concern, and a negative binomial model is consequently preferred over the Poisson model. Due to the excess zeros in the data, the significant Vuong test also implies that the ZINB regression model is better than the standard negative binomial model.

10. Before ICSD was officially initiated by the central government in 2020, there was only very small voluntary interlocal collaboration among certain cities, and the target groups for these shared services were legal persons (e.g. enterprises) but not natural persons (e.g. migrant workers). For this reason, there is no relevant data about ICSD before 2021.

Additional information

Funding

National Natural Science Foundation of China (72104052). Ministry of Education in China Project of Humanities and Social Sciences (21YJC810001). The Major Program of the National Social Science Fund of China (21&ZD125).

Notes on contributors

Xuechun Wang

Xuechun Wang is a PhD candidate at School of Public Policy and Management, Tsinghua University, China. Her research focuses on the intergovernmental collaboration, particularly in the field of digital governance and climate politics.

Ziteng Fan

Ziteng Fan is assistant professor at Institute for Global Public Policy, Fudan University, China. He studies digital government, public sector innovation and collaborative governance. His recent research is published in Public Management Review, Information Technology & People, International Public Management Journal and Policy Studies. Ziteng Fan is the corresponding author.