Reputation, Network, and Performance: Exploring the Diffusion Mechanism of Local Governments’ Behavior during Inter-Governmental Environmental Cooperation

The selective behavior of local governments during regional environmental cooperation could generate a diffusion effect through the black box of reputation mechanism. This study incorporates the reputation mechanism, social capital, and environmental governance performance into a unified analysis framework, empirically testing the moderating effect of the implementation rate of environmental cooperative projects (indicating reputation) on the relationship between two types of social capital and environmental governance performance among cities in the Yangtze River Delta (YRD) and Beijing–Tianjin–Hebei (BTH) regions. The inter-governmental environmental cooperation news and policies are collected by Data Capture technology as a dataset, and a set of social-economic data is also adopted. The spatial econometric regression results show that an increase in reputation could both strengthen the leadership and coordination ability (bridging social capital) of the central cities in the YRD and BTH regions, thus improving their environmental governance performance. However, the bonding social capital path could only significantly work in the BTH region, which unexpectedly increases pollutant emission through excessive internal cohesion. The results indicate that a “community of entangled interest” should be constructed among cities within urban agglomerations, which requires local governments to weaken the concept of their administrative boundary. At the same time, in order to avoid excessive internal condensation, a clear division of rights and responsibilities is also necessary during continuous inter-governmental environmental cooperation. We believe that these findings could provide empirical evidence for local governments to avoid failing to the traps of “agglomeration shadow”.