Against the backdrop of high-quality development through regional integration, intergovernmental collaboration is pivotal to improving urban environmental governance performance. However, existing studies have insufficiently examined the interactive mechanism between collaborative behavior and the vertical “pressure-based system”. Using panel data for 41 cities in the Yangtze River Delta from 2013 to 2023, this study constructs an index of intergovernmental collaborative behavior intensity along three dimensions—consultation, collaborative commitment, and joint implementation—and empirically tests its impact on urban environmental governance performance, with a particular focus on the moderating effect of performance pressure and its heterogeneity. The results show that intergovernmental collaborative behavior significantly improves urban environmental governance performance overall. Performance pressure positively moderates this relationship, indicating that such pressure strengthens the instrumental value of collaborative behavior. Moreover, the moderating effect is significantly context-dependent: it is evident only in cities with lower performance rankings and is not significant in leading cities, suggesting that the pressure-driven collaboration model primarily applies to “catch-up” cities. The findings provide valuable references for developing targeted classified collaborative governance strategies.
FU Xue-qin
. Intergovernmental collaboration behavior, performance pressure and urban environmental governance performance: An empirical analysis based on data of the Yangtze River Delta urban agglomeration[J]. Urban Problems, 2026
, 369(4)
: 68
-78
.
DOI: 10.13239/j.bjsshkxy.cswt.260406
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