Breaking the lock-in of regional governance: A case study of cross-boundary coordinating planning in Yangtze Delta

RRegional Integration of Yangtze Delta, China has been a heated topic since the 21st century, when the communication by the local government or public becomes ever more intense. The meeting of primary leaders in Yangtze Delta was held every year since 2005. By contrast, the cross-boundary coordinating issues shows little progress. For example, Jingdian Road in Kunshan and Songze Road in Shanghai were not connected, though they were only 800 meters away from each other, hindering the flow of traffic. One of the reasons for this lies in the difficulties involved in unlocking the traditional governance paradigm, based on decades of conventional administrative division. If local governments want to connect two local roads across borders, the institutional cost would be too huge to overcome. Recently, we compiled a strategic action planning, , while the Regional Integration of Yangtze Delta is adopted as the national strategy of development. The planning helps solve different cross-boundary conflicts, such as dead end roads, NIMBY facilities, flood discharge barriers, and environmental protection issues. Through the examination of this planning, we found out that the obstacles of regional integration were beyond economic factors, and it is impossibly solved in the local scale. Only by the intervention of national force, solving administrative conflicts among local governments is more feasible. Thus, the local governance lock-in is unlocked and a new paradigm in the metropolitan scale is constructed. In this new paradigm of metropolitan governance, the regional coordinating office of Yangtze Delta is founded as the top negotiation and coordination administration, while the provincial governments should be responsible for the implementation and supervision of various planning. The local governments should also list these planning in their annual projects. Of all the planning, cross-boundary coordinating planning plays a pivotal role in the agreement of specific local affairs, such as the conflicts and demands of transport, infrastructure, ecology, etc.. After the < the cross-boundary coordinating planning between Jiangsu Province and Shanghai metropolis>, connecting dead end roads becomes important affairs of local government. In October, 2018, Jingdian Road and Songze Road was connected and open to traffic as the first successful grogram of “connecting provincial dead end road”. Overall, the paper helps the understanding of a new paradigm of metropolitan governance and the adoption of cross-boundary coordinating planning as a key tool to implement the strategy of regional integration.