Building a responsibility community: the Bay Chief System and cross-departmental collaborative governance—a case study of Lingshan Bay in Qingdao

Abstract Coastal bays face both acute environmental pressures and institutional fragmentation, yet just how effective cross-departmental collaboration can emerge in what remain strongly hierarchical systems remains insufficiently understood. This article analyzes China’s Bay Chief System through the study of Lingshan Bay in Qingdao, which has undergone a widely recognized transformation from a heavily polluted problem bay to a national Beautiful Bay. We develop the concept of a responsibility community and situate it within a framework of authoritarian collaborative governance, arguing that hierarchical authority, resources, and legitimacy can be coupled institutionally to catalyse and sustain collaboration in a state-centric context. Empirically, the study draws on qualitative fieldwork conducted between 2022 and 2025, including semistructured interviews with officials and local stakeholders, the examination of policy and administrative documents, and field observation. Using within-case process tracing and thematic coding, we identify four mechanisms through which the Bay Chief System operates: High-level drive, horizontal integration, vertical integration, and social embedding. These mechanisms link institutional design features, such as nondelegable responsibility for the Bay Chiefs, Bay Chief Offices, data platforms, and participation arrangements, to changes in coordination practices and ecological outcomes. The analysis shows that hierarchy can function as a catalyst for collaboration when it establishes clear centers of responsibility, is backed by appropriate organizational and financial resources and is reinforced by performance-based legitimacy, but this study also highlights vulnerabilities related to leadership dependence, metric-based distortions, and restricted civic participation. The study concludes by specifying the scope conditions under which the responsibility community model is likely to be effective and discusses its implications and limits for the design of cross-jurisdictional environmental governance in China and beyond.