Exploring cross-section risk governance mechanisms for transportation and energy infrastructures in China

Abstract

This study aims to examine the national risk governance mechanism of critical infrastructure in China from a cross-section perspective. The first research objective is to identify whether horizontal collaboration exists in the risk governance of critical infrastructure. Building on this, the second research objective is to investigate the extent of cross-section collaboration in the transportation and energy domains. The third research objective is to identify the pathways of horizontal collaboration at various levels. The data for this research consists of policy documents retrieved from the official websites of the Ministry of Transport of the People’s Republic of China, the National Energy Administration, and the Peking University Legal Information Website. A total of 127 documents were collected using specific search keywords. To analyze data, content analysis is adopted to generate a co-word matrix so that semantic network centrality can be explored. The result indicates that in the transportation domain “engineering” and “road” feature in the top 10 for both standardized degree and degree proportion, while “administration” ranks third highest in share proportion. In the energy infrastructure risk governance keyword network, the fourth highest closeness centrality value is 54.762, associated with keywords such as “administration” and “engineering”. These findings suggest that horizontal collaboration is evident at both institutional and personal levels. Moreover, the results imply that the inner collaboration within national risk governance is intricate and interdependent. The study reveals interconnections between different industries and administration levels, contributing a fresh perspective to urban risk governance theory exploration.