Abstract The societal and biophysical permeability across human‐demarcated jurisdictions within watersheds necessitates collaboration among administrative regions. The effectiveness of such collaboration is partly determined by the degree to which institutional arrangements align with underlying social and ecological interdependencies, a concept referred to as ‘social‐ecological fit’. Using the Yellow River Basin of China as a case study, a social‐ecological network was constructed to depict collaborative relationships between prefecture‐level cities, ecological interdependencies between sub‐watersheds, and jurisdiction of prefectures over sub‐watersheds. Multilevel exponential random graph models were employed to investigate the roles of social‐ecological fit in driving the formation of the collaborative network. Modelling results indicate that prefectures show a tendency to collaborate with those governing the same sub‐watershed and those governing separate but ecologically connected sub‐watersheds, suggesting that the aspiration to promote social–ecological alignment might drive prefectural policy actors to collaborate. Closed triadic social structure that fosters reliable commitment and reduces transaction costs is over‐presented whereas star‐shaped social structure that facilitates information transmission is under‐presented, implying the dominance of high‐risk cooperation problems over low‐risk coordination problems within the watershed. These findings improve the understanding of the roles of key social and social–ecological interdependencies in driving the formation of inter‐regional collaboration for addressing complex watershed governance challenges in the Chinese context that is characterized by a centralized, top‐down political regime. Read the free Plain Language Summary for this article on the Journal blog.
Wang et al. (Mon,) studied this question.