Mechanism, Trends and Prospects of Cooperation and Development in Provincially Adjacent Areas

As a weak link in China's regional coordinated development, the cooperative development of provincial border areas is an important approach to building a unified national market. During the "15th Five-Year Plan" period, with the increasingly prominent effect of regional strategy superposition, the cooperative development of provincial border areas has entered a new stage of multi-scale governance with strategic superposition. This article constructs a multi-scale analysis framework at the macro, meso, and micro levels to systematically explain the governance mechanism, practical trends, and future paths of the cooperative development of provincial border areas. In terms of governance mechanisms, the macro strategic superposition plays a guiding role, providing top-level design for the cooperation of provincial border areas through national strategy guidance and regional policy coordination; the meso spatial framework relies on urban agglomerations, metropolitan areas, and cross-provincial economic belts to build a networked collaborative governance model; the micro spatial nodes, through precise measures such as demonstration zones, industrial parks, and grassroots governance units, stimulate the endogenous driving force for cooperative development. In terms of development trends, the economic aggregate of provincial border areas continues to increase and the gap narrows, the population distribution shows a differentiated pattern of "agglomeration in developed areas and contraction in underdeveloped areas", ecological governance has entered a stage of collaborative breakthrough from overall improvement, and the cultivation of spatial nodes has formed a hierarchical and characteristic development path. Looking to the future, the cooperative development of provincial border areas needs to continuously advance in three major directions: from "geographical adjacency" to "functional integration", from "project coordination" to "institutional innovation", and from "government-led" to "multi-party governance", providing a solid support for building a regional economic layout that is complementary in advantages and high-quality.