Blood is thicker than water: local favouritism and inter-local collaborative governance

Exploring the micro-mechanisms of collaborative governance regarding decision-makers’ behavioural and psychological motivations can advance an understanding of governance in fragmented systems. Among these motivations, local favouritism is a common behaviour that has received little attention in inter-local collaboration. Whether and why local government decision-makers engage in local favouritism in inter-local collaboration remains unanswered. This study incorporates social identity theory into the institutional collective action framework to answer these questions and tests our hypotheses using an empirical case of the impact of provincial leadership turnover on inter-provincial watershed environmental collaboration in China. The results show that decision-makers engage in local favouritism in inter-local collaboration and that the reasons for such behaviour are related to decision-makers’ social identity with their hometowns. The social identity of local decision-makers with their hometowns enhances the utility they obtain when engaging in collaboration. This increased individual utility raises the perceived benefits of collaboration and makes decision-makers more likely to collaborate with their hometown jurisdictions.