Differentiated governance in the Pearl River Delta: Fragmentation and flexibility (PRD 1)

鉴于中国的权力关系具有威权性质，我们令人惊讶地发现，整个珠三角特大城市地区的管治安排差异很大，涉及正式和非正式因素。但这对该地区的治理能力意味着什么？在该项目的第一阶段，我们主要侧重于调查领土差异如何反映到邻里一级的治理安排上--如何产生差异。在第二阶段，我们将分析扩大到城市地区以外的实体，同时调查特定治理模式产生的边界的社会空间影响。在第三阶段，我们希望研究这种空间差异对珠江三角洲整体治理的影响。在一个正在滑向规划失败、日益加剧的隔离和内部竞争的特大城市中，我们是否看到了一个碎片化的过程？或者，我们正在见证一种新的灵活治理形式的出现，在这种情况下，政府威权主义和灵活性之间的紧张关系正在让位于真正带来经济增长和一体化的地方治理模式的变化？我们将在我们的调查中确定的三个不同的地理和政治背景下提出这些问题，即城市、郊区和郊区，以揭示碎片化和灵活性影响治理的方式。我们预计，我们项目三个阶段的共同努力可以为该项目在特大城市层面提出的更广泛的问题做出贡献。

Given the authoritarian nature of power relations in China, we surprisingly find a great variation of governance arrangements, involving formal and informal factors, across the PRD mega urban region. But what does this mean for the governability of the region? In the first phase of this project we have focused mainly on investigating how territorial differences are reflected onto the governance arrangements at the neighbourhood level – on how variations are produced. In the second phase, we have expanded the analysis to entities outside the urban areas, while at the same time investigating socio-spatial impacts of the boundaries produced by the particular modes of governance. In this third phase we wish to research the consequences of this spatial differentiation for the overall governance in the PRD. Do we see a process of fragmentation in a mega city that is sliding towards planning failure, increasing segregation and internal competition? Or are we witnessing the emergence of a new form of flexible governance, where the tension between government authoritarianism and flexibility is giving way to local variations of governance modes that indeed produce economic growth and integration? We will ask these questions across three different geographic and political contexts that we have identified during our investigations, namely the urban, the suburban and the periurban, to unravel the ways in which fragmentation and flexibility are impacting governance. We expect that the combined efforts of the three phases of our project can contribute to the broader questions that the program is asking at the mega city level.