Shaping watershed collaboration: how government attention transforms informal interaction into formal cooperation

This study adopts a public value perspective to examine how government attention allocation influences watershed collaboration. Based on the panel data from 30 provinces in China from 2020 to 2024, we employed negative binomial regression. Results show that attention allocation significantly enhances both formal and informal collaboration, with informal collaboration mediating this relationship. The expected positive moderating effect of digital governance is not consistently supported. Furthermore, by distinguishing between formal and informal collaboration, this study deepens the understanding of the dynamic processes within the collaboration continuum. It provides evidence from Chinese river basins for understanding cross-jurisdictional collaboration.