Intergovernmental collaborative governance of emergency response logistics: an evolutionary game study

Large-scale disasters are characterized by significant risk spreading and cross administrative boundaries of regional governments, and thus intergovernmental collaborative governance of emergency response logistics is of great importance. This paper selects the local government and the external government as game participants and constructs a dynamic evolutionary game model to analyze the evolution process of emergency logistics coordination and the conditions of achieving stability. Multiple factors are considered, which include the coordination cost and benefit, emergency intensity, external synergistic effects, and central government constraints. On this basis, a simulation analysis is carried out to investigate the dynamic evolution trajectory of the game and explore the influence of different parameters on the strategy selection of participants. The results show that: the participant behaviors are not sensitive to changes in emergency intensity, while increasing regional public benefits, reducing emergency logistics cooperation costs and external synergistic effects will increase the willingness of regional governments towards collaborative governance. Meanwhile, the central government constraints can effectively mitigate the imperfect transaction and cost compensation mechanisms for cooperation among regional governments. Intensifying rewarding and punitive measures as well as increasing the coefficient of participation will lead to a rapid evolution of stabilization strategies toward positive cooperation, in which imposition of penalties appears to be more effective than rewarding measures in promoting synergies among regional governments. In brief, this study sheds light on intergovernmental collaborative governance of emergency logistics by developing a much-needed scientific tool and providing a valuable theoretical reference.