Practice of Planning Coordination for Crossborder Spatial Governance in the Yangtze River Delta Region: A Transformative Analysis in Meta-Governance

Nowadays, city clusters have become an important spatial form in the process of global urbanization, characterized by contiguous development across provincial, municipal, and county administrative boundaries, given all-around cross-border circulation of socio-economic factors at the regional scale has become the trend. In order to pursue their own interests, neighboring administrative regions are driven by localism and often deliberately ignore regional level neighborhood issues, especially ecological and environmental issues regarding “public goods”, coupled with weak cross-border spatial governance at the regional level, this has led to prominent negative externalities and constant conflicts in the development of cross-border areas, seriously affecting the developing quality of the region as a whole. This paper attempts to challenge the traditional technical concept of spatial planning, and introduce the meta-governance theory of public administration discipline. The study empirically demonstrates the Yangtze River Delta(YRD), the representative of China’s regional development and pioneer in cross-border ecological governance as an example, and identifies the evolution of the three-stage regional coordination model in the YDR region since the reform and opening up in China, and the successes and failures of planning meta-governance in the cross-border area under different goal-oriented approaches. This paper summarizes a regional planning meta-governance model with Chinese characteristics, to explore the mechanism of spatial planning, as a policy and technical tool for spatial governance, in responding to the ecological governance of crossborder space, and measures how it can effectively play a synergistic role in the regional scale.